What do you think of Centos

[Scot L. Harris]

On Wed, 2006-02-22 at 13:18 -0600, Christofer C. Bell wrote:
> On 2/22/06, Andy Green <andy at warmcat.com> wrote:
> >
> > Identifying with RHAT and acknowledging the benefits we get from their
> > work are Good Things, but there is nothing wrong with respins IMO,
> > legally or morally, in fact its the whole idea.
> 
> That is absolutely untrue.  The "whole idea" of the GPL and Free
> software is to allow anyone to "add value" to what's out there. 
> That's not what CentOS and White Box do.  They take someone else's
> work, remove references to the people that did the work, and package
> it up so that you can "freely" use Red Hat's efforts in creating RHEL.
> 
> They are not adding value.  They are not "making changes that are
> helpful to the community" they are not acting in the spirit of Free
> software.  They're leeching off Red Hat's hard work and yes, despite
> the removal of trademarks, Red Hat's hard fought for and won
> reputation, to let people get at the work without going through Red
> Hat.  That's called "ripping them off."
> 
> That is *not* the spirit of Free software.  That *not* "the whole idea."

To take another thread further off topic from the list.....

The trademarks were removed at Red Hat's request.

Centos does add value by providing a Red Hat like distribution with a
much longer support cycle, compared to Fedora, as well as the Centosplus
repo which includes things the upstream provider does not.  

To quote a portion of the text describing the Centosplus repo:

"The CentOS Plus Repository

This repository is for items that actually upgrade certain base CentOS
componets.  This repo will change CentOS to not be exactly like the 
upstream providers content.

The CentOS developement team has tested every item in this repo, and
they build and work under CentOS-4. They have not been tested by the
upstream provider, and are not available in the upstream products."

It certainly looks like they are providing changes and adding value.  :)