Mike A. Harris wrote:
On Fri, 31 Oct 2003, Emmanuel Seyman wrote:
IMHO stopping to provide SRPMS wouldn't be in RedHat's interests in
the first place.
I have trouble seeing why.
There is no real benefit in my opinion to Red Hat holding back
the source code rpm packages to everything. I'm kindof confused
as to why people would think otherwise personally, as not
providing source code to people would more likely do more harm
than any good. Both in terms of less people being able to access
the sources and potentially fix things or use the code to improve
other software, learn, advocate Linux/whatever, etc. and also in
terms of negative publicity, public beatings, the slashdot
effect, etc.
I definitely agree with the statement "stopping to provide SRPMS
wouldn't be in RedHat's interests in the first place."
I agree that in the LONG term it is in RedHat's interest to release the
SRPM's of their packages. For all the reasons you state. And maybe
also for the simple reason that SW is inherently better
if all participants share and share alike! :-)
This is the whole idea of OpenSource right?
(Cynically and practically however)
I also think that they RedHat could /strategically/
decide that some SOURCE packages for critical security updates
might be available to RHN subscribers a week before they are
available for anonymous public download.
RedHat could also limit their public FTP site to a reasonable throttled
limit (maybe 8Mb/s cap and a limit of 100 simultaneous logins.)
This would have two effects. It would basically make it impossible for
for people to be complete freeloaders. (they would at least have
to pay for one RHN subscription so that they could get the security
patches for their publically accessible servers
in a reasonable time frame).
This couldn't be reasonably argued against RedHat as being bad,
just as being less philanthropic than they had been before.
Sure there would be lot's of people who think they are owed something
for nothing, but they are just a lot of noise.
Also, I think that RedHat should work out a deal with Oracle and BMC
and Veritas etc...... RedHat should provide Certificates for their
systems that could be BOUND (SIGNED WITH or BY)
to a certificate for an Orcale or BMC
or Veritas etc.... That way Oracle could refuse to honor your
Oracle support contract unless you had a paid subscription
for RedHat. This would bind RH-Labs better too. Ensuring that the
players in the party could all contribute fairly.
You might think that vendors would never do that.... But in my experience
it wouldn't have any practical difference whether done or not.
When you call vendors for support
they insist that you have all applicable patches (and their dependencies)
installed before you can get any support from the vendor that isn't already
available in their documentation anyway. I mean sure, they will pay someone
minimum wage to read the docs to you over the phone, but if you really
need an Engineer's or Developer's support, they will make sure you have the
current "blessed" configuration before they waste their time.
-Ben.
