On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, Ravi Verma wrote: > 1. Is it appropriate for vendors like Oracle to certify their product for > distribution from one particular Linux distributor? > This gives the impression that there is Linux and then there is RedHat > Linux as opposed to being a mere distribution of it. I abhor the idea of > forking. We have already paid a heavy price as a result of forking of > Unix. As a personal opinion, I believe it is "Appropriate" but decidedly not "Optimal". However, keeping in mind that many vendors such as Oracle are unused to dealing in an Open Source environment I also believe it is understandable that this is the approach they are taking. It is also our job as consumers to point out (nicely) to people such as Oracle that you as a customer of theirs - believe this tactic to be sub-optimal and would like them to invest time and effort into finding a solution that is more "Open" in that the product becomes reasonably vendor independant as the direction things are headed toward is an open OS platform where applications tend to be non OS specific. There should be nothing stopping Oracle from simply having a list of dependancies that need to be filled before Oracle can be installed and possibly listing a number of vendor distributions of linux that fulfil these and leave it up to the customer to choose a distribution. > 2. Oracle's marketing claims that RedHat has certain code as part of RHEL > which is not public yet. If that is true and that private code is still > called Linux, would Red Hat Linux still be in compliance with GPL? If they make such claims then surely they can back this up with details - as RedHat are extremely open about what their OS contains, where the changes are and what licences they fall under. (the sources are freely downloadable after all) It is a rather serious accusation to make and you may find that it is simply a marketing persons way of saying "he's asking stuff I have no idea about, we'll make something up and hope he goes away" An interesting Tactic would be to get the marketing person to send this to you in writing and then ask RedHat to comment on this, tho some may view this as slightly underhand it could prove to be ammusing :-) -- Steve. -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
