On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 11:34 AM, Jim Perrin <jperrin at centos.org> wrote: > > > What we didn't do was create a support mechanism to fracture the > community every time someone got an idea. That seeks only to tear away > at the community rather than to build it up. Is that how you describe every other open source project? Ones where the tools to rebuild are easily available? Are they all really that bad? > Several groups took the distribution we put out and changed it to suit > their own needs just fine. ClarkConnect as an example. I think you are missing a bit of history in that project and its clearos successor. Notably the issues around the delay of a 6.x release. Not to revisit those issues, but still everyone _must_ stay away of the dependency chain and the potential of upstream problems when that dependency is forced. > Hugely incorrect and outright FUD. The point of this is to *build* > community. Offering free RHEL would fracture and destroy several > communities, as well as damaging likely damaging Red Hat's reputation in > the eyes of everyone inside those communities and anyone outside who > wanted to throw stones. I strongly disagree with that. Red Hat's community and reputation were just fine back in the day when they did not restrict access to binaries. In fact, if it were not for those days, we'd probably all be using debian. Their problem would be in how to enforce the requirement that all copies of RHEL in an organization have to be under paid support to have any if not for the distinction between the rebuilds and their own. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com