You state:
That has nothing to do with Linux and Red Hat. I do not know
why you bring it up.
End excerpt.
I respectfully disagree in so far as the issue concerns the future of
whatever Linux (or other environment) that Fermilab/CERN and the
"official" collaborations thereof use, and the HEP community in general.
If Fermilab/CERN, etc., under restrictive covenant license
substantially different from the GPL and/or Linux licenses, deploys an
internal FCSL X, for some X, say, there is no guarantee that such an
internal deployment would be released the same as the current SL or IAS
Springdale. It might be released evidently as required by the GPL,
etc., in source code, but in such a way as to making the building of a
full executable environment ("OS") therefrom a very onerous task that
highly under-provisioned academic research groups simply cannot
undertake. Moreover, under whatever restrictive covenants the
collaborations have (by any terms for such covenants that you wish),
there thus would be no assurance that any of the collaborators could
release such an "OS" were it come into internal existence. Clearly,
Fermilab/CERN need to come to some sort of decision as to the path
forward, as, save for licensing for fee, IBM RHEL 8 does not appear to
be viable for the myriad uses in a HEP or similar environment. The
fruits of that decision may not be made generally available, unlike SL.
As has been pointed out on this list, systems engineering requires
planning and a planned path forward (with contingency plans, of course,
for disaster recovery and the like), and a major issue many of us
confront is what is the path forward? Such a path is vital, and has
appeared without planning incident (but with a number of implementation
and deployment issues, the typical discussion on this list) for the SLN
to SLN+1 migrations prior to the demise of SL8. It is that demise that
puts this sort of planning discussion onto this list. Alternatives,
such as Ubuntu LTS have been discussed.
On 3/6/21 5:16 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 5, 2021 at 8:31 PM Konstantin Olchanski <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> To add. all official published results must be done using "official analysis",
>> and for the purposes of this discussion, said "official analysis"
>> often runs exclusively on RedHat-flavour linuxes.
>>
>>>
>>> Most HEP (and sometimes other) "academic" collaborations have
>>> collaboration agreements for all member institutions (or groups or ...
>>>
>>> That was my meaning of NDA.
>>>
>>
>> That has nothing to do with Linux and Red Hat. I do not know
>> why you bring it up. And you did not get it completely
>> right, either. In Physics, we do not have to sign legal NDAs
>> to participate in experiments and projects. It is basically
>> an honor system, and everybody plays by the rules
>> and/or breaks the rules per basic human nature. Books have
>> been written about this stuff.
>
> There are often quite potent contracts, with universities, private and
> public funding agencies, and your agreements with whoever gives you
> office space to work in, maybe a salary, and maybe a computer account
> or library privileges. Human nature is devious, duplicitous, and
> deceitful, it's at the core of how we manage the world.It is human
> nature that we create agreements, sometimes quite elaborate and
> complex, to manage the deceit and theft and abuse that are so often
> part of human nature. It's why we, and yes, I'll include myself as a
> physicist from my work with building the first safe cochlear
> stimulators for use in MRI's, have peer review. We weren't trusted,
> that involved a great deal of deep suspicion, and some department
> heads having to recuse themselves because they had a stake in the
> experiment. It worked *very* well, by he way. We got great images of
> how sound perception actually propagates through the human brain from
> only one ear, fascinating stuff that you cannot normally do with an
> MRI because they go "PING! PING! PING! PING! PING! PING!" and
> overwhelm hearing in both ears.
>
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