[Beowulf] A press release

[Karen Shaeffer]

On Thu, Jul 03, 2008 at 12:09:49PM -0400, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Jul 2008 at 9:34am, Tim Cutts wrote
> >On 2 Jul 2008, at 4:22 pm, Prentice Bisbal wrote:
> 
> >>B. Red Hat has done such a good job of spreading FUD about the other
> >>Linux distros, management has a cow if you tell them you're installing
> >>something other than RH.
> 
> Erm, do you have any examples of that?  All I see is RH a) trying to sell 
> their product (nothing wrong with that) and b) in general, being a pretty 
> good member of the OSS community.
> 
> >Fedora did not exist, and I'm still not sure how separate from Red Hat 
> >Fedora and CentOS really are, but that's probably just my ignorance.  The 
> >fact that
> 
> CentOS is in no way officially associated with Red Hat.  At all.  They use 
> the freely available RHEL SRPMs to build the distribution, and they report 
> bugs upstream when they find them.  But that's it.
> 
> As for Fedora, see <http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board>.

Hi,
Red Hat is indeed an exemplary member of the OSS community. They never
violate licenses. What they do do, is they take every advantage they
can to differentiate themselves. This results in very unfriendly
distributions to modify and customize -- Red Hat wants service contracts
that are not really compatible with such activity anyway. Its by design.
And quite effective.

Fedora Core is dominated by Red Hat employees. It is for all intents
and purposes a hybrid distribution that is semi open to the public. It
is definitely a beta distribution for RHEL.

CentOS is not related to Red Hat in any way. These folks just use the
GPL to produce a free clone of RHEL releases. And I might add, it is
very well maintained. I highly recommend it to folks who are going to
modify and customize RHEL, because your RHEL service contract won't
permit that anyway.

If you are interested in such issues, you might want to pay attention
to the recent and ongoing discussion about systemtap (A Red Hat managed
project.) And the consternation of other folks in the OSS community at
the difficulty in working with the project independent of Red Hat. In
this case, we are talking about the kernel development community. Just
follow the thread from here:
https://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-2008-discuss/2008-June/000149.html

Actually a very interesting thread, dealing with more than systemtap.

Thanks,
Karen
-- 
 Karen Shaeffer
 Neuralscape, Palo Alto, Ca. 94306
 shaeffer at neuralscape.com  http://www.neuralscape.com