[CentOS] The future of centos

[Lamar Owen]

On 04/04/2015 07:04 AM, Always Learning wrote:
> I think it inevitable that Red Hat will introduce some closed source
> packages for the its paying customers, ...
For the sake of perspective, even in the old Red Hat Linux boxed sets in 
1997 this was true.  There was a whole CD of closed source stuff that 
you got in the boxed set that was never available for download.  Things 
like WordPerfect for Linux, for starters.  Sybase ASE was in one of the 
boxed set's  Linux Applications CDs (but I seem to remember it being a 
'limited' or 'personal' edition).

Harking back to 1998, here's what is on that CD for Red Hat Linux 5.2:
[lowen at dhcp-pool114 Red Hat Vendor Disc Oct 1998]$ ls -1
AIS
Applix
ARDI
CASEMaker
CodeForge
Crosswinds
Decosoft
DigitalControls
EST
Fastlane
Flame
Herrin
HKS
InfoSpring
JX
KAI
Knowledge
Knox
Multisoft
NetWin
NExS
Perforce
README
REBOL
RPMS
SAFE
Shpink
SpectraLogic
Stalker
SuSE
Sybase
Take5
TRANS.TBL
VariCAD
Visual
WGS
WP
[lowen at dhcp-pool114 Red Hat Vendor Disc Oct 1998]$

This is also true for RHEL, and has been for quite a while.  There is a 
whole 'Supplemental' disc that has packages for which there is no source 
freely available, although the number of packages on that disc is 
relatively small, most of it being IBM Java for the 7.1 supplemental 
server disc.

So it is nothing new to have closed source value-add in the Red Hat 
ecosystem.