On 06/07/2013 05:46 PM, David C. Miller wrote: > It appears that Redhat is starting to offer newer packages as an add on license to their distribution. In the past I believe they only offered add on license packages beyond what did not come with the base distribution like GFS or the HA packages. Of course this has also changed over time. The latest beta release of software collections and the developer suite shows that they are providing software channels that install newer versions of GCC(4.8), Python(2.7, 3.3), PHP, perl, mariadb, etc. I'm wondering if at some point Redhat is going to remove these packages from the base distribution and only have them as add on licensed channels. I guess they still need a baseline version that will stay the same for the customers who refuse to update for compatibility reasons. At this point the developer suite is a pretty good deal because you get RHEL server with most of the licensed add on channels for only $99 a year. However, you're not suppose to use it for production.. Is there a pl > an for the CentOS group to release these newer packages too? If these packages start being used by developers and required to run their programs/web apps I think it could marginalize RHEL clone distributions like CentOS. > > David. Red Hat has a long history of commitment to open source. I have seen nothing to indicate that this is changing. They have their "base" OS and then they have a bunch of optional add-ons, like their Resilient Storage (gfs2) and High-Availability (HA cluster stack) AddOns, as you mentioned. As you can see, there packages are available from CentOS because Red Hat releases them under the GPL. Whether CentOS decides to offer a repo with the newer versions of software or not is a separate question that I will skip here. The core question, "are RHEL clones being marginalized", I would say "No". I've certainly not seen anything to that effect in either their behaviour or their policies. -- Digimer Papers and Projects: https://alteeve.ca/w/ What if the cure for cancer is trapped in the mind of a person without access to education?