On 03/21/2013 12:11 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
> ... instead of SuSE enterprise that is RPM (but yast, not yum) based, 
> and has to release full source (not binaries/directly useable) for the 
> OS environment under the same conditions as TUV of SL?  SuSE is just 
> as stable, but typically incorporates more current versions of 
> applications and libraries than does the TUV chosen. Any insight would 
> be appreciated.  If SuSE had been chosen (SuSE originally was from the 
> EU and thus a more natural choice for CERN), what would we be losing 
> over SL?

The answer to your question is very simple, and I'll answer it by asking 
you a question:  where are the publicly available sources for current 
SLES/SLED and updates?  Source is easily available through subscription 
channels (which meets the letter of the GPL; the GPL does not require 
public distribution, but it only requires distribution (or a written 
offer to distribute) to those to whom binaries are distributed) if 
you're a subscriber, but if you're not a SLES/SLED subscriber, where are 
the sources to the updates?  The OpenSuSE source is easy, but OpenSuSE 
is to SLES or SLED as Fedora is to TUV EL, or at least close.

> To the best of my knowledge, there is no SuSE Enterprise clone 
> equivalent to the SL or CentOS clones of TUV EL.
>

There is a simple reason for that.  And the answer is again 'where are 
the publicly available (not requiring a subscription) sources for SLES 
or SLED (and, most importantly, updates) found?'

If source were publicly available, there would be rebuilds out there; 
the lack of rebuilds is pretty telling.  Google for 'SLES rebuild' and 
see what you find.

The fact of the matter is that our favorite upstream vendor goes beyond 
the requirements of the letter of the GPL and makes the source publicly 
available, not requiring a subscription to access. Now, it's been a 
while since I've looked for a public source distribution site for 
SLES/SLED sources, but I could not find it when I last looked, which was 
about a year ago when I was beginning work on figuring out which 
distribution to use for our three SGI Altix systems; I settled on 
rebuilding CentOS 5 from source on IA64, since I could not find publicly 
available update sources for SLES 11 (which is supported on IA64, for a 
substantial cost that I can't afford) anywhere.  Sure, I can get SLES 
'for free' for trial use, but that only gets you the 'service packs' and 
not the continuous updates (or the source for those updates) unless you 
pay for the subscription.

SLC5.4 (SL CERN) was available on IA64 (that's the last version made 
available, too), and I used that as a bootstrap to rebuild CentOS 5 on 
IA64 from source, and I'm running CentOS 5.9 on IA64 now.

And there is of course the SL-documented reason that someone else 
in-thread has already pointed out.