Yasha Karant <[log in to unmask]> writes: > How exactly does a for-profit corporation buy an endeavor such as > CentOS? By hiring the key, primary developers, I would imagine. > Could RH buy SL from Fermilab/CERN? RH can try (and has succeeded once in the past) to hire SL developers away. However, both labs have a wide and deep pool of technical ability and I don't think RH could begin to exhaust that by this practice. Personally (and please note the various conditional phrases), as long as Debian exists and continues to follow its own constitution, all of these corporate machination do not worry me. My feeling is that the only thing that keeps RH derivatives going is historical inertia and, in only a tiny fraction of the installations, adherence to RH conventions in order to enable the use of proprietary software (aka evilness). If RH's business decisions begin to levy significant costs on this community, comparable to the (low) cost needed for the many talented SL admins to upgrade their experience to Debian, then we will see a gradual draining of the SL user base. This draining will be first seen in those users who are not part of the primary SL target (which is particle/nuclear physics) and so will largely leave SL unaffected at first. If the costs increase further and become prohibitive to FNAL's strategy of respinning RH sources then they will switch to Debian (or some popular corporate derivative, because directly leveraging Debian would make too much sense). If we ever do reach this description of reality, this sea change will occur well after the break-even cost point has been passed unless some charismatic, pro-Debian person takes a leadership role in SL at FNAL and forces the issue early. If all this does come to pass, it will be a good thing, in my opinion. At the very least it will teach a legion of people to laugh at the irony of calling a RH respin "Scientific Linux" as they discover the relative cornucopia of scientific software which exists in Debian and which is lacking in SL. Okay, enough cloudy crystal ball gazing, carry on with the speculation. -Brett.