On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 09:30:11AM -0800, Samuel Flory wrote:
> Ed Wilts wrote:
>
> >Morally, it's another story. You should by a subscription for all your
> >systems, but you don't have to legally do it as long as the packages you
> >redistribute are GPL'd.
> >
> >
> >
> I'm missing me the moral point here. The orginal creators of most of
> the programs in question wanted their program to be used freely.
> Otherwise why use the gpl?
Red Hat does a *lot* of work before you get a rpm distributed. If you
think they just grab the source code from a developer, slap a spec file
in it, create an rpm, and ship, you're missing the point of what a
distributor does. A LOT of testing goes into each package, and
frequently additional patches are applied, documentation is written,
files are moved around, and so on. As new fixes are applied, Red Hat
frequently backports them to earlier releases that the developer no
longer cares about.
> For the most part RH is simply packaging these programs in an rpm.
Take a quick look through the changelogs:
rpm -q <package> --changelog | less
Now tell me that it's a simple packaging. You're so far out of line
you're insulting the Red Hat engineers.
> Besides the whole point of AS is the support, and certifications.
And the 3-year commitment to security releases. Think that's trivial?
Grab a 3-year old arbitrary package and see how many fixes need to be
applied. Now test them with every combination of the packages that the
user may typically have installed.
You make support sound like it's a matter of a user picking up the phone
and asking how to configure X. Support is a LOT more than that. Doing
it properly is expensive and time consuming. Providing patches for
security holes is expensive and sometimes needs to be done on weekends
or evenings depending on the severity. Emergency testing needs to be
done.
Red Hat has made, and is continuing to made, an important and expensive
contribution to the community. Although you may legally continue to
distribute your own copies of the AS SRPMs, if everyone does it,
eventually Red Hat will be forced to discontinue the product. If it
doesn't make money and has no prospect to make money, don't expect any
legitimate business to continue to do it. Red Hat expects to be able to
pay their staff, and rightfully so.
.../Ed
--
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program
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