On 15/01/14 19:49, Patrick J. LoPresti wrote:
>
> - Red Hat (the company) considers Oracle (the company) one of their
> top two competitors.
>
> - Red Hat considers CentOS a competitor.
>
> - Red Hat believes acquiring CentOS will improve their bottom line.
>
> These statements are not "attacks". They are neither "good" nor "bad".
> They simply are.

They simply are pure speculations.  You might be right in the first point, 
based on that both parties are commercial companies delivering competing products.

But the rest is pure garbage.  Red Hat has been for quite some years very 
considerate and supportive to open source communities, even if they've not 
been in-house projects.  And as several has stated, the Red Hat's mission 
statement is quite clear, something which you seem to completely ignore:

     To be the catalyst in *communities* of customers, *contributors*, and
     partners creating better technology the *open source way*.

It cannot be said much clearer.  And now the work of the CentOS community has 
an even clearer way to contribute back to the Red Hat.  *That* is a big win. 
Suddenly CentOS can help their upstream to improve.  Red Hat can get better 
products based on contribution from an officially bigger community, which 
again rains down on the CentOS and SL users.

And Red Hat hasn't /aquired/ Cent OS, but CentOS was supportive to the idea to 
come under the Red Hat umbrella, just as Fedora has been for many years (even 
though Fedora was initiated by Red Hat).  Anynow, *if* CentOS had rejected 
this, nothing would have changed from what it was.  Red Hat could not enforce 
such a move.  This move is something that *both* the CentOS leadership and Red 
Hat found being beneficial for both parties, which is why it happened.

And that's all we on the outside knows.  That's the only conclusion we can see 
currently.

So please, stop speculating.  Unless you have some real facts which proves 
things differently.

--
kind regards,

David Sommerseth