Free vs. pay versions

[Jarod Wilson]

On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 10:21 PM, Richard Pieri <richard.pieri-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Aug 22, 2010, at 5:48 PM, Jarod Wilson wrote:
>>
>> Sure. But I never said that was the case. I said 'No, everything used
>> to build RHEL is released to the public. And its "Red Hat", not Redhat
>> or RedHat. :)'. To which I got a reply of "Incorrect". Has absolutely
>> nothing to do with ISV certifications, and the only way my statement
>> has anything to do with trademarks, is that I was correcting the Red
>> Hat name.
>
> Legally, it has everything to do with certification.  Say that you're running Oracle RDBMS on your home-build RHEL system compiled from source code.  Oracle has every legal right to deny you support because you are not running the same OS that Oracle has certified.

Sure. But a certification is not a piece of software. We're talking
about the software used to build RHEL and the software distributed by
Red Hat.

> Aside: no argument about the name. :)
>
> If I had an RHEL 5.5 disc I'd put it side by side.  In practice, a) I have better things to do with my time, and b) Red Hat has shipped closed source in the past.  Specific example: Red Hat Cluster Suite.  Specific example: RNH Satellite Server.  These are not vague recollections.  These are specific things that I looked for and found no source code because Red Hat had not released it.

These are also separate products from RHEL though, not something on
the RHEL distribution discs, so while they're not vague recollections,
they're still not binary-only bits shipped in RHEL. :)

Red Hat Cluster Suite has been fully open-source for some time now
(definitely was in the RHEL5.0 GA timeframe, as all the cluster bits
were merged onto the distribution discs then, but so was full sources
to them -- they're built and included in the CentOS tree too).
Satellite Server was finally open-sourced a year or two ago, but yes,
these two were initially shipped w/o source. (For the record, I just
double-checked the RHEL3.0 and RHEL4.0 package trees, there's no
cluster bits in them at all).

> I will give you this: it may well be possible to build RHEL v5.5 from SRPMs and get something indistinguishable from the binary distribution.  That is, however, not true for every previous release.

It wasn't in the RHEL3.0 days, as some -devel packages weren't shipped
on the actual isos. Pretty sure it was for some subsequent RHEL3.x
update and RHEL4.0 on though, and its definitely true for RHEL5 and
will be for RHEL6.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org