[clue-tech] CentOS

[mike havlicek]

Hey,

Anybody familiar with CentOS? I am checking it out
based upon  a contract requirement. But I don't think
it (the distro) is really kosher. It seems to be an
absolute steal of RedHat Enterprise. Things are
confusig with GPL
but to totally take RedHat Enterprise and distribute
it freely was quite a task if legal. 

I have read the copyright information with RHEL AS4.X.
I think it does indicate that the source is freely
available and can be modified as long as you remove
all RedHat logos. But on the other hand the source is
only available if you agree to a contract with an
expiration.

Certainly the RedHat modified kernel is proprietary. I
actually was not aware that the RedHat kernels were
modified until about 2 weeks ago.... when I found that
I got errors between RHEL-AS-4.2 distro and a current
buld of the kernel on my host.

What I did find was that RedHat currently distributes
a 2.6.9 modified kernel. It has patches for certain
features I believe up through 2.6.13. (could be wrong)
I do know that I wrote a bash script to grab and patch
the 600+ RedHat patches. So I figure those kernel
patches make the RedHat system propriataory. The
source rpm didn't work on my machine for building the
kernel. I don't know why you would want to go down
that route anywho ... since if you are compiling the
kernel you certainly would want to configure it???

Regardless I think the spec file in the source rpm had
conflicting information regarding Intel x86
architecture. 

I stll do wonder where CentOS got their code and if it
is legal.  

-Mike


		
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