91
Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams | The Register
(www.theregister.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
91 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37717 readers
392 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The problem here is not the source of the applications, but the source of the package build scripts - which in big parts are RedHat property.
RedHat must provide you the sources - but for that it is sufficient to give you the source of whatever is packaged. In the past commercial distributions just fulfilled that requirement by dumping source packages, which have the source as well as the scripts required to build binary packages. They do not have to provide you with the build scripts.
The problem with RedHat is that many companies certify their stuff to work on RedHat - so for that to work without running into the occasional obscure problem you need to build the sources the exact same way as RedHat is doing. That's what CentOS used to do until version 7, and that's what currently some other distributions are doing. Without the build scripts it'll be next to impossible to do that - you'd pretty much have to duplicate the RedHat engineering team. But it is completely legal, as they own the scripts, and since they're completely separate from the application itself don't have to be GPL.