Kuhn: Thoughts On GPL Compliance of Red Hat's Linux Distribution

Posted Mar 12, 2011 12:27 UTC (Sat) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

If it was really the case that the change doesn't affect anyone, RedHat wouldn't have made it.

Or alternatively, if RedHat considers everyone else clueless and unable to understand patches, they really wouldn't have made this change, since all those clueless people were just going to waste their time building broken kernels by applying RH patches directly, without testing or understanding. And that just makes RH look better!

No, clearly RH understands that this does affect some clueful people, a particular subset of which they really want to make things difficult for...

Posted Mar 12, 2011 18:34 UTC (Sat) by xtifr (subscriber, #143) [Link]

People who work with kernel on daily basis and follow developments in mainline, can do this faster than some tool. :^)

I was under the impression that most such people ran their own kernels in any case. I was thinking more of independent developers who are trying to support their own code, but aren't generally afraid to trace a problem into the kernel when it seems necessary—I've found myself in that exact position a few times in my life. If your users are reporting different results on, say, Debian vs. Red Hat, you might want to do some quick-and-dirty triage, but with a monolithic patch set on one side, that becomes much, much harder.

Of course, the last time I had to face a similar circumstance, the kernel devs were mostly still using BK, and I didn't want to deal with that whole mess, so I was forced to debug the old-fashioned way, but now the kernel devs are using the same VC that I use for most of my own projects, so I'd be much more likely to be irritated and inconvenienced by RH's monolithic patch.)