Thank you for your impressions and (partial) clarification on the
license source availability requirement situation.
Given that:
AL, Rocky, and all other IBM RHEL clones depend upon IBM RH to release
buildable source (that is source code and the tools required to build
that source to an executable installed distro), and that
none of these entities seem to have the resources to develop "from
scratch" a "new" enterprise Linux,
it seems that all EL users, including those who are using
built-from-RHEL-source clones, are at the mercy of IBM RH, that is, IBM.
If IBM decides to enforce IP control over what does not have to be
released under the GPL, BSD, Linux, etc., licenses, one would not have a
buildable "clone". Am I correct? Given the historical track record of
IBM (now including IBM RH), one may not be long term optimistic if the
continued release reduces IBM total "revenue" (the only real interest of
IBM corporate business -- not research -- management).
My understanding is that Canonical is bound by Debian so long as Ubuntu
is Debian based -- under Software in the Public Interest, a USA
non-profit, that "controls" Debian -- to release buildable source.
Debian is very unlikely to change the license. If Canonical decided to
"do an IBM RH", it would need to start a non-Debian derivative. Is this
correct?
Hence, for long(er) term stability in the availability of buildable
source, amongst enterprise production distros, to my naive
understanding, Ubuntu LTS has better prospects than any IBM RHEL clone.
On 4/5/21 7:52 AM, Lamar Owen wrote:
On 4/3/21 2:57 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:
Is IBM RH required under the GPL and Linux licenses to release without
charge the fully buildable source code for whatever Linux derivatives
IBM RH provides under binary executable installable license for fee?
The only source that has to be released at all is source covered by
licenses that require it. There are many packages in the EL
distributions under licenses that do not require it. I'm not going to
do all of the legwork for you on this, but a quick repoquery (found in
package "yum-utils"):
# repoquery --queryformat "%{license}"|sort|uniq|wc -l
Last metadata expiration check: 0:48:27 ago on Mon 05 Apr 2021 09:19:33
AM EDT.
758
#
Narrowing down the repositories to just the core ones (BaseOS,
AppStream, PowerTools), and just looking at the numbers of packages by
%{name}, using a simple grep for either the string GPL or the string BSD
in the %{license} tag:
GPL: 4,191
BSD: 1,285
Total: 6,383
Neither GPL nor BSD license: 1,608 (yes, that's more than expected,
because there are 701 packages where both the strings GPL and BSD are
found in the %{license} string; run:
repoquery --repo BaseOS --repo AppStream --repo PowerTools --queryformat
"%{license} %{name}"|grep BSD|grep GPL
to find out which ones).
Number of unique licenses in these repositories: 444 (302 are GPL or
similar, 118 are BSD or similar).
... Is there going to be a new ELC (Enterprise Linux Clone) list, ...
I would imagine each rebuild would have its own unique communications
channels, unless someone has the resources and is willing to put
together a combined list.
Will EPEL, ElRepo, etc., continue to support AL8 with the various
package, drivers, and utilities that base EL8 "lacks"?
As of right now, both EPEL and ELrepo specifically support RHEL. CentOS
and other rebuild support from either is purely determined by how close
to RHEL the rebuild is.
