On 06/27/2014 04:49 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
> ...
> 1.  Is CERN linux the same as SL?

Scientific Linux CERN is what is being talked about here.

>
> 1.1 Are any of the Fermilab team doing the same as in the posting from 
> Singh?

...

You should read the archives of the centos-devel list and note the 
number of accepted patches to the buildsystem and to packages that are 
being made by persons with fnal.gov affiliation.
>
> 2,1  As Red Hat employees, one assumes their primary loyalty are to 
> and directions come from
> their corporate employer.  Is this consistent with a SL-type 
> distribution in which the user
> community (such as the CERN LHC collaborations) have ultimate needs, 
> not those of a for-profit
> corporation?

You know, I have to chuckle at this.  SL is already driven by the needs 
of Red Hat, counting by number of lines of source code (and the source 
doesn't just drop out of the sky fully formed, after all; Red Hat 
invests a large amount of development time building the source to begin 
with, including funding developers for the upstream projects that all 
Linux distributions utilize (yes, the Linux kernel itself, to which Red 
Hat has done a massive amount of work)). Nothing says Red Hat's needs 
and the communities' needs are not or cannot be in alignment; on the 
contrary, the fact of the SL rebuild even existing shows how well Red 
Hat's needs and the communities' needs are aligned.  The other fact of 
the matter is that both fnal and CERN have and use RHEL licenses for 
other areas.  The fact that Red Hat is able to turn a profit and still 
so closely match the communities' needs is quite remarkable.

> 3. Will SL just be a SIG of CentOS?
>
The SL team will have to answer that one, in their own time.  IOW, be 
patient.

In reality, there are far more things in common between SL and CentOS 
than are different, as they are after all built from almost entirely the 
same source code base.  It's great to see open collaboration going on in 
the rebuild effort; a breath of fresh air, really.