On 6/3/2011 8:57 AM, Lamar Owen wrote:
> 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.
I'm not really talking about what Red Hat does - and I'm not against
selling restricted software in general. I'm talking about what would be
more in the best interest of the community that they attracted by
permitting redistribution of the collated works - and then cut off.
> 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.
But the need for the rebuild projects shows that Red Hat has restricted
access to what is mostly the result of community work. Go back and look
at the changelogs of programs in the era between the RH 4.x and 9
releases if you don't remember how bad the stuff they initially shipped
was or how it got fixed. (I picked 4.x because as I recall it was the
first CD that you could drop into a typical PC and have something come
up working, and I'd consider that a turning point in the number of Linux
users). Without the timing of that 4.0 release and its ease-of-install,
we'd probably mostly be using a *bsd flavor now (which might not be such
a bad thing either).
> 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).
At the time, RH was backporting fixes into most/all of their previous
major-number releases in a way that clearly wasn't sustainable. So they
had to do the split between fast-track new development and long-term
supported versions that get backports, but it is not at all clear that
they had to restrict redistribution in addition to selling support.
This just created the need for Ubuntu...
> 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....
Yes, this effort let the community be lazy and avoid learning a
different administration style. But in the long run, I'm not convinced
that being lazy and avoiding the jump to a project that does not
restrict redistribution in the first place and relying on these
work-arounds is a good choice for any of us.
> But, I do understand and am sympathetic; I miss the old boxed sets as much as anyone.
More to the point, wasn't that the reason you started using Red Hat in
the first place? Well, that and the fact that the large number of other
users who chose it for the same reason meant that drivers for the
devices you use were likely to be contributed and available for it
first? Would you have given it a second look back then if it had the
redistribution restrictions?
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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