Jim Cornette wrote: > linux.whiz@xxxxxxxxx wrote: > >> I personally think that the CentOS project and Whitebox and those >> re-spins of RHEL are pretty much ripping off Red Hat. Red Hat spends >> a ton of money, time and effort in making their enterprise distro. >> They give the entire thing to the community via the Fedora project. >> As required by the terms of the GPL, they release everything for RHEL >> as source RPMs. Then the clone distros come along and respin them and >> give them away. >> > > They have to recompile the source rpms. They do try to mirror the RHEL > distributions. I think it would be interesting for one of the clones to > come out with i686 optimized compilations. It might not improve > performance a lot from the arguments presented from the RH side. It > might add something for the community in showing two distros, one cloned > but optimized and another pretty much mirroring RHEL to the line. > That is how Mandrake was started - they optimized for the i586 while RH was still optimized for i386... > They are not ripping off RH with their efforts. They are giving those > that cannot afford the RHEL price scheme with a slow moving and reliable > version of RHEL without phone support contracts and the like. > I have to agree - they are providing a product and support in a market that RH moved away from. RH decided that it was not profitable to support this market. So others are filling the gap. If anything, it tends broaden the base of RH compatible systems out there, making it more attractive to market products for RH systems. In the long run, it will probably increase RH's sales as some users migrate to RH as their support needs grow. After all, that is really what RH is selling. Mikkel -- Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!
