On 03/21/2013 12:11 AM, Yasha Karant wrote:
... instead of SuSE enterprise that is RPM (but yast, not yum) based, and has to release full source (not binaries/directly useable) for the OS environment under the same conditions as TUV of SL? SuSE is just as stable, but typically incorporates more current versions of applications and libraries than does the TUV chosen. Any insight would be appreciated. If SuSE had been chosen (SuSE originally was from the EU and thus a more natural choice for CERN), what would we be losing over SL?
The answer to your question is very simple, and I'll answer it by asking you a question: where are the publicly available sources for current SLES/SLED and updates? Source is easily available through subscription channels (which meets the letter of the GPL; the GPL does not require public distribution, but it only requires distribution (or a written offer to distribute) to those to whom binaries are distributed) if you're a subscriber, but if you're not a SLES/SLED subscriber, where are the sources to the updates? The OpenSuSE source is easy, but OpenSuSE is to SLES or SLED as Fedora is to TUV EL, or at least close.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no SuSE Enterprise clone equivalent to the SL or CentOS clones of TUV EL.
There is a simple reason for that. And the answer is again 'where are the publicly available (not requiring a subscription) sources for SLES or SLED (and, most importantly, updates) found?'
If source were publicly available, there would be rebuilds out there; the lack of rebuilds is pretty telling. Google for 'SLES rebuild' and see what you find.
The fact of the matter is that our favorite upstream vendor goes beyond the requirements of the letter of the GPL and makes the source publicly available, not requiring a subscription to access. Now, it's been a while since I've looked for a public source distribution site for SLES/SLED sources, but I could not find it when I last looked, which was about a year ago when I was beginning work on figuring out which distribution to use for our three SGI Altix systems; I settled on rebuilding CentOS 5 from source on IA64, since I could not find publicly available update sources for SLES 11 (which is supported on IA64, for a substantial cost that I can't afford) anywhere. Sure, I can get SLES 'for free' for trial use, but that only gets you the 'service packs' and not the continuous updates (or the source for those updates) unless you pay for the subscription.
SLC5.4 (SL CERN) was available on IA64 (that's the last version made available, too), and I used that as a bootstrap to rebuild CentOS 5 on IA64 from source, and I'm running CentOS 5.9 on IA64 now.
And there is of course the SL-documented reason that someone else in-thread has already pointed out.
