On Fri, Nov 28, 2014 at 3:34 AM, Karel Lang AFD <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On 11/27/2014 08:58 PM, Patrick J. LoPresti wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 27, 2014 at 11:25 AM, Jos Vos <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Red Hat did not buy CentOS.
>>
>>
>> They employ the principals and own the trademark.
>>
>> Are you saying they got them for free?
>>
>
> Agreed with Patrick, i'm watching this whole deal with a suspicion.

It's a separate issue from "should I use CentOS or Scientific Linux"
in a number of ways. One is that Red Hat has always been very good
about publishing as much as possible of their source as compilable
freeware or open source, and has strived to make it available and
rebuildable by everyone. They have been model citizens, and that
should earn them some respect for their motives. I could spend all day
analyzing possible motivations, but they've followed the open source
and freeware rules and worked very well with 3rd party developers. I
applaud their historical behavior.

What does or will Scientific Linux have that is better? I've
appreciated the Scientific Linux community's support for new users,
and their inclusion of hooks for 3rd party repositories such as
Repoforge. I've also appreciated that they'd stayed out of burning
cycles trying to support Xen based virtualization. And the big kicker
for me right now is the inclusion of the third party atrpms, rpmforge,
adobe, elrepo, and rpmfusion as available yum configurations. I work
in the USA, so I have to be cautious about software patents and the
use of libdvdcss, which can decode copy protected DVD's.

That means that RHEL, and CentOS with personnel employed by Red Hat,
cannot contain the libdvdcss library. And it means that they're
unlikely to ever contain links to the atrpms repository, at
http://packages.atrpms.net/, where such potentially intellectual
property law infringing software may be found. So, for overseas
clients not bound by some of these laws and needing audio or dvd tools
that are legal in their country, I suggest they consider Scientific
Linux and revew the tools made available by "yum install
yum-conf-atrpms"