On Friday, June 03, 2011 09:06:28 AM Les Mikesell wrote:
> Yes, RedHat deserves the credit for denying access to the binaries of open
> source work, even to the community responsible for it even existing.
[snip]
> But when you say that, keep in mind that the 'original packages' part is the
> packaging work, not the creation of the vast majority of the code. And that the
> Red Hat company made its name and developed its community of users by allowing
> free access in the first place up until the EL/Fedora split. Personally I think
> everyone who uses free versions would have been better off if they had switched
> to Debian the day that Red Hat put the restrictions on redistribution, but I was
> too lazy to learn the options to 'apt-get'.
Red Hat deserves credit for still provided the source RPM's in buildable form even for those parts of the distribution that are not GPL licensed. They are not required by license to do that; for instance, the PostgreSQL RPM's, since PostgreSQL is BSD-licensed. I mention that particular package only because I have first-hand knowledge of that package.
Red Hat deserves credit for providing vast amounts of developer time to the upstream projects, including but not limited to the kernel, glibc, gcc, GNOME, PostgreSQL, and RPM itself.
Red Hat is not the only Linux provider who has limited distribution of binaries. And as the CentOS and other rebuild projects have proven time and time again, having the source (and some time and significant effort) is sufficient to build a fully binary compatible distribution.
To my eyes it was a win-win for Linux, since without the for-profit model that Red Hat adopted, Red Hat likely would not be around today, nor would Red Hat-funded developers likely have been able to continue to devote as much time and effort as they have done. Perhaps they could have handled the PR in a better way, but then again when someone is used to freeloading they're going to hate having to pay anything at all (and that's not an accusation of anyone in particular, just a simple observation of human behavior).
The CentOS developers/rebuilders are to be commended for taking on the significantly difficult task of not just taking at rebuilding the system, but taking on the much more difficult task of making the resulting rebuild 100% ld-level and dependency-level binary compatible, as least as much as is possible with the released source code to the distributed binaries. Not to mention the far more difficult task of then releasing it publicly and dealing with that....
But, I do understand and am sympathetic; I miss the old boxed sets as much as anyone.
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