What do you think of Centos

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Wed, 22 Feb 2006, Christofer C. Bell wrote:

> On 2/22/06, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> No, it's not clear.  First you complain about them removing
>> the tradmarks, then continue with a complaint about when
>> they tried to give some credit.  Which is it you'd prefer?
>> They were never pretending to 'be' RedHat but they did
>> try to describe the origin and legal status of the product.
>
> I would prefer they leave the distribution of Red Hat Enterpise Linux
> to Red Hat Software, Incorporated.   What you seem to be missing here
> is this, Les (and others): "I do not care what they do to be in the
> clear legally, I think they're in the moral wrong."

You are entitled to your opinion, of course, but Red Hat seems to have 
less of a problem with this issue than you do.

While RH is legally obligated by the (L)GPL to offer source to the (L)GPL 
components of their Linux distributions to their customers, they are not 
under any obligation to offer that source to the public.  Nor are they 
obligated to offer source for other components either to their customers 
or the public.  Yet they do.

More to the point, they are under no obligation to offer the source to the 
public in the form of the exact SRPMs they use to build RHEL.  Yet they do 
that as well.  And they distribute their updates the same way.  If they 
felt that the clone distros were detrimental to their business model, I 
would think they would stop doing that.  Note that many of those RPMs are 
interdependent, so they can't have any expectation that people won't build 
complete distributions using them.


>
> [Reductio ad absurdum argument deleted]
>

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs