Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

lists.centos.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 126 posts

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#111

Post by blueskin_ »

nitrogen wrote: post #94
ghshephard wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Red Hat was attempting to keep their product from the open-source homebrew market " Nothing would make Red Hat happier than having every hacker under the sun using Red Hat - what they were attempting to do was keep the enterprise customers, who were currently paying $1000+/CPU (or so) go with a free alternative and kill their company. Simply removing three things allowed them to do that: (1) No RHN/Up2Date available…

(3) Most importantly, absolutely no mention or reference to "Redhat" Trademarks. This is evil, because the law is supposed to allow referential use of trademarks as a fair use. Otherwise, RedHat's existence is highly beneficial to Linux.

That's a self-imposed policy on CentOS' side, not something they were forced to do.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#112

Post by geekowl »

jlawer wrote: post #45
pyre wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would the build, test, and delivery chain be subject to Red Hat's legal team? Did the process to remove Red Hat's marks from their GPL'd source trigger trademark issues?

I think the problem is that if they missed a trademark then CentOS was distributing Redhat's Trademarks putting them in a sticky legal position.

This is one of the reasons for being a fully independent distro with no ties to a "corporation". Debian comes to mind, as does Slackware, Arch, Gentoo, a couple of others. Being able to go about your business as a distro without corporate oversight is desirable these days.

CentOS now has a "master" where before, the GPL allowed them to simply take the source, remove trademarks, and re-compile as CentOS, getting the benefits of a corporately-funded distro without the legal constraints of evil IP and what not.

RH also may choose to play ball with certain organizations that I don't agree with. This may affect CentOS in some way. An indy distro can give them the finger and tell them to get bent. My goal is not money, it's freedom from oversight, freedom to do as I please, freedom to have an unencumbered distro not tainted by the likes of the false notion of IP, legal nonsense, you name it. Debian is growing for a reason. One of those reasons is because it's an indy distro.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#113

Post by dec0dedab0de »

justinmk wrote: post #39
redhatstory wrote: post #23

In the beginning, there was Red Hat Linux[1]. It was sold in boxes at stores such as CompUSA (remember?) but was also available for free download from Red Hat. Then, Red Hat decided they could make more money by spinning off Red Hat Linux into a separate enterprise-only product called Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which they declined to make available for free in a ready-to-install binary form. Fedora[2] was also…

Red Hat is one of the most prolific single-entity contributors to open source in the history of open source. I find it really odd that some FOSS people regard Red Hat as some sort of evil corporation that should be the target of said FOSS people's flung shit. By the way, what did Firefox do to live down its IceWeasel[1] infamy? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat

True but Redhat ditching support for home users was pretty lame. I had bought a boxed copy with support two weeks before they made the announcement. I had already downloaded it, I just wanted to support the company. Luckily I knew the manager at best buy, and she let me exchange it for Suse. That being said, I think much of the resentment towards Redhat comes from memories of dependency hell before yum was reliable.

As far as IceWeasel, I asked a Mozilla employee about it a few years ago. He said they generally approved of it, and were just glad that people were using the code.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#114

Post by dllthomas »

cturner wrote: post #102
cookiecaper wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Firefox trademark dispute is not the same thing. Red Hat was attempting to keep their product from the open-source homebrew market -- they wanted to charge money for their software, and did this as far as the license would allow. Red Hat was as hostile as legally permissible to anyone trying to circumvent this, like CentOS. Mozilla simply claimed that the Firefox trademark cannot be applied to any codebase that M…

Because Debian issues a version of Firefox that contains unofficial patches, they cannot legally call their distribution "Firefox", since Mozilla hasn't officially blessed that exact codebase. There's a lot of sense to this. Consider the hacked up configurations of vim that ship with redhat and debian. The maintainers code intrusive personal-favourite settings into /etc/vimrc (e.g. settings that reformat your code).…

There are some parallels, but I think customizing a default config is subtly different than code changes. Redhat and Debian likely have both, of course...

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#115

Post by blcknight »

Shish2k wrote: post #71
ams6110 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is that they got a bad rep long ago before there were decent package managers. As I recall, you had to install dependencies manually and updating a system could get nightmarish. Nothing really wrong with rpm as a package technology per-se, but before yum it was a lot less friendly.

Just a couple of days ago I was doing an upgrade from 6.4 to 6.5 and yum died in the middle; fixing that was quite hellish as rpm somehow decided that multiple conflicting versions of several packages were installed at once (eg glibc v131 and v137), and it wouldn't do anything until that was fixed (it wouldn't even attempt to fix the problem until it was fixed... "yum-complete-transaction" just complained about thing…

package-cleanup --cleandupes

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#116

Post by blcknight »

mergy wrote: post #90
ams6110 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is that they got a bad rep long ago before there were decent package managers. As I recall, you had to install dependencies manually and updating a system could get nightmarish. Nothing really wrong with rpm as a package technology per-se, but before yum it was a lot less friendly.

Indeed, but even with YUM, the process is unsavory and the number of sources is surprising limited. I ended-up just compiling from source because it was faster than trying to deal with RPM dependency problems.

What you mean number of sources is limited? The distros come with their own repos with a large selection of software.

When you go outside of that, you need to have a specific reason...like going to RPM Fusion to grab things like non-free codecs.

I'm just guessing, but it sounds like you're going to rpmforge and downloading a random RPM, maybe it's not even for your distro, and installing it and then trying to find all the other dependencies and in the end you've got Fedora, CentOS, and SuSE packages all forced installed on the machine and maybe whatever you were trying to do worked. That tends to be what people who bitch about yum/rpm are doing: they're doing stupid things.

RPM/Yum works just fine for 99+% of its millions of users.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#117

Post by bonzini »

geekowl wrote: post #112
jlawer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is that if they missed a trademark then CentOS was distributing Redhat's Trademarks putting them in a sticky legal position.

This is one of the reasons for being a fully independent distro with no ties to a "corporation". Debian comes to mind, as does Slackware, Arch, Gentoo, a couple of others. Being able to go about your business as a distro without corporate oversight is desirable these days. CentOS now has a "master" where before, the GPL allowed them to simply take the source, remove trademarks, and re-compile as CentOS, getting the b…

I understand what you mean by independence from corporation, but from CentOS it's the other way round.

CentOS has always been a "slave" of Red Hat by design and, before this move, the master could even sue it for misappropriating trademarks. Now, QA of packages can be done in the open, because it would no longer be as problematic to ship test-quality packages that still happen to include a Red Hat trademark.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#118

Post by SEJeff »

pferde wrote: post #104
rattray wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone who has "given Ubuntu a go", but has no expertise whatsoever... can you explain what your list of RHEL/Ubuntu pros & cons mean? I have no idea why one arrangement of /etc/ is preferable to another, for example. Is it just security, isolation, and better package management?

Please read again. Those are not "pros&cons", but mere list of differences between the two distro families.

Exactly. They are just the differences. If you'd want a technical pro/con of Ubuntu/Debian vs Redhat/Fedora, that is an entirely different post equally as large (perhaps more-so). In summary, from an ease of sysadmin standpoint for large numbers of servers, redhat and the redhat ecosystem (cobbler, pulp, freeipa, sssd, abrtd, kickstart) just beats the living pants off of anything Ubuntu/Debian have. It is much easier to manage thousands of Redhat machines (without building everything custom like google) than it is thousands of Ubuntu/Debian machines. I know this because I've done both as part of my day job.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#119

Post by hackinthebochs »

rootbear wrote: post #81

I hope this will make it easier for me to use CentOS at NASA. They only want us to use Linux distributions that are actively supported with security fixes and for some reason they don't think CentOS qualifies, since it's not a "real" company. They prefer us to use RHEL, Ubuntu, or Suse. But if this new arrangement increases the perception of timeliness for updates, then maybe we can start using it and save some money…

Why does it matter? If they have the budget for it what's the problem with spending money on RHEL? I don't see the benefit in pushing CentOS over RHEL when licensing isn't a factor.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#120

Post by tedchs »

ghshephard wrote: post #53
cookiecaper wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Firefox trademark dispute is not the same thing. Red Hat was attempting to keep their product from the open-source homebrew market -- they wanted to charge money for their software, and did this as far as the license would allow. Red Hat was as hostile as legally permissible to anyone trying to circumvent this, like CentOS. Mozilla simply claimed that the Firefox trademark cannot be applied to any codebase that M…

"Red Hat was attempting to keep their product from the open-source homebrew market " Nothing would make Red Hat happier than having every hacker under the sun using Red Hat - what they were attempting to do was keep the enterprise customers, who were currently paying $1000+/CPU (or so) go with a free alternative and kill their company. Simply removing three things allowed them to do that: (1) No RHN/Up2Date available…

Yes, and the other big advantage of RHEL in enterprisey environments is their compatibility certifications with other vendors (e.g. Oracle Database).
Post reply on HN