Red Hat and the GPL [LWN.net]

Red Hat and the GPL

Posted Mar 11, 2011 9:25 UTC (Fri) by PaXTeam (subscriber, #24616)
In reply to: Red Hat and the GPL by gregkh
Parent article: Red Hat and the GPL

> My personal opinion is that Red Hat is fine in doing this if they want to.

then why did you see the need to explicitly call them out in the 2.6.32.30 announcement?

> Red Hat didn't make this very easy due to their "one giant patch" format[...]

now imagine if *everyone* else followed suit, where would that leave Linux development? is that the future you envision?

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Red Hat and the GPL

Posted Mar 11, 2011 16:45 UTC (Fri) by gregkh (subscriber, #8) [Link]

I only "called out" a thanks to Max for digging through the large
patch from Red Hat to figure out what patches should be applied.

That work was hard based on the format that Red Hat is shipping their
kernel patch in these days, and the work should be thanked. It has
no relevance on my opinion of what Red Hat is doing here.

>> Red Hat didn't make this very easy due to their "one giant patch"
>> format[...]
>
> now imagine if *everyone* else followed suit, where would that leave Linux
> development? is that the future you envision?

Um, this makes no sense as that is not how upstream development works.
If the upstream development procedure changed to be this way, then that
would be a different conversation and topic. But as it is, it has no
relevance at all here.

Red Hat and the GPL

Posted Mar 11, 2011 22:43 UTC (Fri) by PaXTeam (subscriber, #24616) [Link]

> That work was hard based on the format that Red Hat is shipping their
> kernel patch in these days, and the work should be thanked.

actually, i forgot to point it out previously, that 'kernel patch' does not exist. what does exist is a big monolithic tree with all changes applied on top of whatever base they had at the time.

> It has no relevance on my opinion of what Red Hat is doing here.

you just called this 'digging through their giant patch' hard the second time now. in my little world that's an opinion, and not exactly a flattering one (note how you thanked someone else, not RH).

> Um, this makes no sense as that is not how upstream development works.

we're not talking about upstream development. we're talking about RHEL development. they're two different 'products' with different development methods. what i was pointing out is that if all similar products (to RHEL, not upstream) began to distribute their derived works the RHEL6 way, what would you think of that? still be ok with it?