Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
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...
I tried Mandrake 5.3 and a few of the 6.x releases where you could
install a Redhat system and upgrade it to Mandrake. I was attracted by
the KDE addition that I guess was not new but was not distributed by
Redhat distributions because of a dispute regarding the qt license at
the time.
Other than KDE addition and Mandrake providing iso images of their
distribution, I almost switched over to the distro.
Redhat soon followed the iso availability for the Rh distro and caught
up in other areas where Mandrake was excelling in value added features.
I did not realize that Mandrake was ahead in the optimization game. With
a distribution that pretty much requires a hefty computer and i386
legacy is pretty much not a factor for modern distributions, i586 sounds
like it would make better sense.
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.
I felt comfortable maintaining a cloned distribution. I was bored with
the more primitive look and feel of the RHEL clone and only experimented
for a short while on the distro, Centos for reference.
With other posts on this thread, I think that Centos providing a direct
clone and also a value added repository would work in all directions to
improve the products at both upstream and downstream levels.
Jim
Mikkel
