RE: The Unhappy Demise of RH9

[Geoff Dolman <geoff.dolman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As far as I know - & could be wrong - you need to recompile all the
source rpms on the relevant platform ie rhel and redhat 6.2 for the
compat libs.

You'd also need to provide all the other stuff to make it a bootable CD
- eg all the stuff anaconda needs, etc and make it a bootable image,
etc. ie this is not a trivial process.

As this stuff is released under the GPL there is nothing to stop you
from recompiling the whole shebang and calling it your-company-linux and
distributing it - but if you do you'll have to remove all Red Hat's
trademark material.

However, there is a further snag which is that currently Red Hat see fit
to make the source code to RHEL publicly available - but, I believe I am
right in saying that, the GPL only obliges them to distribute the source
to the recipients of their binary distribution. In other words they
could remove this stuff from their public ftp site at any time and still
be legal within the GPL which would leave people who were recompiling
RHEL in a bit of trouble - ie yopu can't rely on this approach long
term.

At any rate, I personally think this process is way more hassle, from a
perspective of workstations, than either learning a new distribution or
going to *BSD or Solaris x86 on the desktop. And this is what I find so
hard to understand about Red Hat's new licencing mechanism.

Of course people will not mind paying to support their servers -
presumably they do already - but why bother with workstations or
desktops? If you are running on supported hardware you don't really need
OS support on desktops because if anything goes wrong you can trivially
reinstall with kickstart or bugzilla the problem. 
You do need the patches though...
For organisations like Universities where Red Hat has been deployed on
hundreds if not thousands of systems for cheap compute and as a cheap
alternative to an expensive UNIX workstation the potential bill runs
into tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to support machines
that previously they supported for free. It just does not make financial
sense for these organisations to continue to use Red Hat on these
systems. Yes - they could use Fedora - but do you want to be upgrading
every four to six months on non-critical systems



On Wed, 2003-11-12 at 15:45, bruce wrote:
> hi...
> 
> thanks for the update/information.. however, since RH is apparently still
> going to provide the "code" for the future RHEL OS(s).. how hard woud it be
> for someone to "package" the code into the familiar ISOs that we're used to
> seeing and making them available to other users...
> 
> not sure what to do regarding eratta and future updates....
> 
> thanks...
> 
> -bruce
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: redhat-migration-list-admin@xxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:redhat-migration-list-admin@xxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Tom Diehl
> Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2003 9:07 PM
> To: bruce
> Cc: redhat-migration-list@xxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: The Unhappy Demise of RH9
> 
> 
> On Tue, 11 Nov 2003, bruce wrote:
> 
> > hi...
> >
> > it was my understanding that the rhel would still be available from the RH
> > ftp site... perhaps as IOS/or source... but that it wouldn't be supported
> > unless you purchased the app.....
> 
> It is available as .src.rpms which means you have to build it yourself and
> if it breaks you get to keep the pieces. :-)
> 
> HTH,
> 
> .....Tom
> 
> 
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-- 
Geoff Dolman
JDRF/WT Diabetes and Inflammation Laboratory
Cambridge Institute for Medical Research
University of Cambridge
http://www-gene.cimr.cam.ac.uk/todd/


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