[CentOS] Will CentOS become obsolete now because of the changes Red Hat is implementing?

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 5:07 AM, Rudi Ahlers <Rudi at softdux.com> wrote:
> This post appeared on another forum:
>
> Will CentOS become obsolete now because of the changes Red Hat is implementing?
>
> Red Hat has changed the way it distributes Enterprise Linux kernel
> code in an effort to prevent Oracle and Novell from stealing its
> customers, making it more difficult for these competitors to
> understand which patches have been applied where.

Oh, son of a ...... . I once spent six months *un-obfuscating* a lot
of kernel code changes in a company's internally used and optimized
kernel, becuase the developers had been doing their developments off
in la-la-land. It's a good story, ask if you're curious.

Such tweaking makes it very hard to integrate other published kernel
changes from local kernels or the upstream kernel. This is, of course,
the *point*, but if you're someone like me who's sometimes asked to
incorporate optimizations or drivers on top of someone else's code
changes, it makes it considerably harder to tell which changes you
might be overwriting or conflicting with.

It really shouldn't affect CentOS releases: the kernel code doesn't
have lots of trademarks in it, so it shouldn't be hard to recompile
the kernel without tweaks. But for someone like me who gets asked to
support Infiniband (before it was popular) or various fiber channel
cards with RHEL 4 or CentOS 4 for software compatibility reasons, it
could be an issue.