On 22/06/16 03:33, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
On 2016-06-21 14:48:58 +0200 (+0200), Zane Bitter wrote:
That isn't my understanding, but it's hard to give a definitive
answer without knowing what kinds of non-free software you're
referring to (since I know there have been fierce disagreements
even e.g. within Debian on topics like firmware blobs).
[...]
While I do tend to ascribe to the Debian and OpenBSD (and sometimes
FSF) concepts of "free," I'm mostly referring to source
redistribution issues I experienced in bygone years (my last direct
experiences were back in the RHN/up2date days). Particularly things
like, if I want to (re)build RPMs for RHEL where do I find the SRPMs
used to create them and what license are they distributed under (at
least back then you needed portal access/entitlements to even be
able to download the source packages)?
I'm not familiar with the ancient history, but the SRPMs dating back to
the first RHEL release in 2002 are publicly available for downloaded from:
http://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/enterprise/
Poking around a bit, it looks they've since started maintaining
specfiles in public source code repositories and with RHEL 7 they've
made some commitment to keeping CentOS 7 SRPMs consistent (in line
with the community merger) so you can download those directly even
if you aren't a customer and want "RHEL equivalent" SRPMs. I think
it's laudable that Red Hat has started to treat things like
packaging metadata as part of their software and consider it freely
redistributable now, though it makes me wonder if RHEL AS 7 and
CentOS 7 are supposed to be fundamentally the same at this point
(minus support contracts) then what is the point of making RHEL free
for developer use (does it come with a free support contract)?
Meh, as a developer I want to develop on the exact OS binaries that I'll
be running on in production, not a rebuild from the same source. There's
an official answer that's basically a longer version of that:
http://community.redhat.com/centos-faq/#_developers
There's no support for the free subscription, but it does include access
to the developer forums and knowledge base.[1]
[1]
https://access.redhat.com/products/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/Developer/#dev-page=1
(BTW "RHEL AS" hasn't been a thing since 2003 ;)
And
if the difference is that there's software/features available in
RHEL that you can't get under CentOS, it sounds an awful lot like an
"open core" scenario still.
This is absolutely not the case.
"Since Red Hat Enterprise Linux is based completely on free and open
source software, Red Hat makes available the complete source code to its
enterprise distribution through its FTP site to anybody who wants it." -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux#Rebuilds
cheers,
Zane.
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