On January 22, 2021 5:06:41 PM CST, Matthew Miller <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 08:35:44PM +0000, Jamie Burchell wrote:
>> Can RH put a stop to projects like Rocky Linux?
>
>Yes, in two possible ways.
>
>First, Red Hat could stop making RHEL. The amount of work that goes
>into
>this is _quite_ significant, particularly in terms of the long-term
>stability that everyone is very excited about. Rebuild projects would
>then
>have nothing to rebuild.
>
>But, Red Hat isn't going to do that, because RHEL is important to Red
>Hat
>both as a product and as a base for the company's other projects.
>
>Second, Red Hat goes way beyond the obligations of the licenses of many
>of
>the pieces of software that comprise the distribution. Large, vital
>swaths
>of RHEL are not under "copyleft" style licenses. Without the full
>source
>published in a regular and timely manner, rebuilds couldn't exist.
>
>But, Red Hat isn't going to do that, for a number of reasons but mostly
>because free and open source is essential to what Red Hat *is* as a
>company.
>And it's not just a goodwill thing or whatever: everyone from the front
>lines up to the highest levels knows that it's key to our business
>success.
Will not speak about future, but about the past. As external observer for about a couple decades I would second that. I always praised RedHat for meticulous following GPL. They are required to make available source of their derivative work. They do more, as rpms are more than just source. To my folks I maintain machines for as sysadmin I always mention as example cygwin. After RedHat bought out Cygnus Solutions, they kept cygwin alive, available and active project. BTW, cygwin was the first where guest system calls were on the fly colverted to host system calls. Which makes virtualization really fast. Compared to emulating generic CPU what vmware was doing at that time. No one mentions that, but proprietary parallels desktop is doing the same, having learned it from cygwin, and VMware later followed the same route I bet. Of course, one can only guess about proprietary software.
Not happy about CentOS change, but where credit is due, I can not avoid mentioning it.
Valeri
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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