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

61–70 of 126 posts

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#61

Post by dragonwriter »

justinmk wrote: post #58
veidr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it really odd that some FOSS people regard Red Hat as some sort of evil Why do you find it odd when it is succinctly explained in the comment to which you are replying?

GP doesn't "explain" why RH is evil. Discomfiting legal maneuvers do not cancel their thousands of commits to the Linux kernel, init.d, GWT, Cygwin (!), etc.

> GP doesn't "explain" why RH is evil.

It explains why some people in the FOSS community think of them that way.

There seems to be a problem here of people not being able to understand that it is possible for people to have a different point of view, and no amount of "explaining" is going to fix that.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#62

Post by stock_toaster »

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…

> they were threatened by Red Hat's legal department and forced to remove all mentions of Red Hat and even links to Red Hat's web site from the CentOS web site.

Doesn't trademark require you to enforce your trademark (or you lose it)?

Also, Oracle did/does the same thing as CentOS, and sells support for it. There is also ScientificLinux too.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#63

Post by gsnedders »

cookiecaper wrote: post #50
justinmk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

Note that having patches from upstream doesn't stop Mozilla from being willing to license the "Firefox" trademark — they will still license it provided they are happy with all the patches. The bigger issue in the Debian case is that while they could distribute a modified version as "Firefox" (under license), some downstream couldn't then take that, modify it, and still call it "Firefox".

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#64

Post by matt__rose »

undoware wrote: post #54
BCM43 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so?

I'm not sure what the OP 'mergy' intended, but I'd guess that the intended reason had to do with better ecosystem curation. Under the hood, my understanding is that .rpm is marginally inferior to .dpkg, but not remarkably so. E.g. using cpio instead of gz as the format basis. So by elimination, the only reason to prefer .rpm would be the rpms, if you follow. As a longtime Fedora user and a recent emigre (post-Snowden…

Mostly it's a matter of picking your poison. dpkg allows some things that RPM doesn't, and vice-versa. dpkg does have some nice features (well, features I can't remember, except for I went "Ooo, I want rpm to have that" when I saw it)

One thing that dpkg has that really annoys the hell out of me is allowing for user input during the transaction. It makes unattended upgrades impossible

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#66

Post by hacman »

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…

Actually, under the GPL, Red Hat is only obligated to make sources available to its customers. What they have done is make the sources available to everyone on the Internet for free [1]. So CentOS would have to pay for RHEL were it not for Red Hat's openness. Probably not a big deal. However, Red Hat is under no obligation to make its non-GPL packages (e.g., python, ruby, apache, postgresql, ssh, etc.) available to anyone in source form, including their customers. These, too, are available free of charge to the general public. Finally, Red Hat is under no obligation to make any of the source of their own internally-developed projects (e.g., package management, OS installer, and all of the other projects that differentiate the distribution from a software perspective) available under an open source license, but they do (admittedly, this was not always the case). Finally, Red Hat employs many developers who work full time on critical projects (kernel, gcc, gnome, etc.). They are pretty model open source citizens whose business model is not to use open source as a gateway to their own proprietary products like IBM and Oracle.

If they wanted to shut down CentOS, it would be very easy to stop distributing the source of their own projects and of permissive license packages. Hopefully sponsoring CentOS is not just a play to exert influence on the project and retard its progress, but I am willing to give Red Hat the benefit of the doubt here.

[1] http://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/enterprise/6Server/en/os/...

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#67

Post by mattzito »

ams6110 wrote: post #57
justinmk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I find it really odd that some FOSS people regard Red Hat as some sort of evil corporation Indeed, the success of Linux in the enterprise owes a lot to Red Hat, as they gave enterprises the sort of consistent, corporate-buzzword-compliant support agreements that removed a lot of the scariness that would otherwise impede use of Linux for "important" services.

It's not just the support agreements (though support agreements didn't hurt). It's that RHEL provided the sort of stable path for patches and upgrades that Linux traditionally did not, moving as quickly as it did.

It allowed ISVs to certify their software packages against a consistent OS built, hardware vendors to utiliza a long-term consistent driver interface, and end-users to not have to worry about upgrade cycles, sudden performance changes, and so on.

Basically it gave enterprises that had been dependent on Solaris and the like a comparable Linux alternative.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#68

Post by langdon »

this_user wrote: post #49
johnchristopher wrote: post #46

What would the consequences/benefits be for the Fedora project ?

RHEL and CentOS are aimed towards enterprise customers, Fedora is for individual users. I don't think there's any kind of real competition or even overlap between CentOS and Fedora. In addition, Fedora is basically a community project (although led by RH). It seems unlikely that RH would be able to shut down or materially alter the Fedora project even if the wanted to. In the worst case scenario the community could j…

The Fedora Project is also going through some pretty significant changes. See https://lwn.net/Articles/569795/ (although slightly OT).

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#69

Post by themodelplumber »

dmourati wrote: post #65

I've largely made my living off CentOS software. I hope this new friendship doesn't cause CentOS to become diluted or eventually shuttered. Great project run by a very small number of very dedicated supporters. Best of luck to them.

My concern is more along the lines of a sudden injection of tons of energy causing the CentOS ecosystem some extreme growing pain. That could filter down to individual service providers' servers becoming less reliable or even just needing more frequent attention, which would be painful enough.

Re: CentOS Project joins forces with Red Hat

#70

Post by craigching »

hacman wrote: post #66
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…

Actually, under the GPL, Red Hat is only obligated to make sources available to its customers. What they have done is make the sources available to everyone on the Internet for free [1]. So CentOS would have to pay for RHEL were it not for Red Hat's openness. Probably not a big deal. However, Red Hat is under no obligation to make its non-GPL packages (e.g., python, ruby, apache, postgresql, ssh, etc.) available to a…

> Actually, under the GPL, Red Hat is only obligated to make sources available to its customers.

That is true, but the GPL allows their customers to freely distribute the GPL source they receive. Not saying Red Hat doesn't help or isn't doing good here, but it's not quite as altruistic as you make it out to be. I thank the GPL for that.

Note that I'm a huge fan of Red Hat and preferred their distribution since the RH 4 days, I don't want to denigrate Red Hat in any way. Also a huge fan of CentOS as well.

Post reply on HN