On Wednesday 08 January 2014 17:15:04 Jos Vos wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 08, 2014 at 09:44:50AM -0600, Lirodon wrote:
> > Now, what I was thinking about was trying to see if we could unify as many
> > of these EL spins as possible to produce a sort of "unified", independent
> > distribution. [...]

This is always the intention, but the outcome is nearly always the same as 
what happens with "unifying standards": you wind up with yet another standard 
to add to the stack and have complicated the very target of your reduction 
efforts. This is at the heart of the problem development firms have when 
trying to target Linux (and the idea we can rely on packagers to do things for 
us is not congruent with the way the consumer software market works, though it 
(mostly) works out for community interest projects and dire-need server-side 
software like Apache).

It is important to note, I think, that the fear surrounding this has nothing 
to do with closed VS open source -- we're talking about open source. The real 
issue is unpaid community access to commercial project source in a form that 
doesn't require a massive repacking/development effort, and how readily that 
translates to user-end binary access in a form that is stable and 
maintainable.

I'd say Red Hat has the best record of any company out there when it comes to 
this point, and though I heavily disagree with a (very) few things they've 
done, my disagreements have been technical in nature. If anyone has earned the 
benefit of the doubt, its Red Hat. (Arguing against fiat imposition of new 
standards or core components in Fedora, for example, really boils down to me 
being upset that the sponsor/hand-that-feeds is forcing a code change I don't 
like, regardless how my emotions make the argument feel at the time.)

> It's pretty interesting to see how open source people (I'm one of them)
> in a lot of cases tend to fight with each other instead of fight against
> "the enemy" (TBD, but I'm talking about the non-open world, the "pseudo"
> open source companies, etc.).

We have a tendency to insulate ourselves so thoroughly from the *real* closed-
source world that we forget how vast the darkness is and begin arguing amongst 
ourselves over what shade of white the light should be and which direction it 
should be pointing. "GPL" has evolved a social meaning quite apart from its 
legal definition, in particular there is a built-in expectation that any 
company that develops open source software is somehow mandated to provide free 
global access to source, a community space for people to argue over how evil 
the company is for not breaking itself trying to providing free binaries for 
every platform as well, and tacit or direct sponsorship for community projects 
that may not advance the company's goals (or may indeed even hamper them).

For an application developer (as opposed to a platform developer), its 
actually easier to keep a clean, friendly reputation by writing purely closed-
source software for purely closed-source platforms because the incidence of 
name-smearing will be near zero so long as they don't venture into the 
turbulent waters of the OSS community space. Adobe was considered a generally 
benign, and at times benevolent, community force until it released a platform 
(Flash), and ever since Adobe has been the target of untold trash talk.

Taking the above in perspective, it is unreasonable to begin turning the 
spincrank on the conspiracy generator because Red Hat has decided to embrace 
(yet another) open source community. In fact, it is unhelpful to do so until 
there is a genuine cause to start FUDding the largest, most visible champion 
of open source software in the world.

> Unless proven otherwise, I would give Red Hat the benefit of the doubt
> (which they deserve, given their history).  If CentOS provides an open
> RHEL clone (more open than they did in the past), then we should accept
> this and be (very) happy with it.  Everyone is free to start their own
> pet projects, but as long as there is no need for it (and again, given
> the history of CentOS and their lack of transparency there was a need
> for it in the past), any effort to start a "competitive" project is
> IMHO a complete waste of effort.
> 
> And about the reasons behind this: I do not know them, but maybe one
> of the considerations is that an "official" clone is better than
> having a company like Oracle gaining market share with their clone.

This last bit is what I was really getting at. Time will tell, but this 
appears to be a masterful move to not only provide an obvious support plan 
choice that drives revenue right back home, but also undermine every other 
RHEL clone. Savvy, not evil.