Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore [LWN.net]

Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Posted Oct 19, 2010 22:51 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore by ITAnalyst
Parent article: Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Hm. According to you, how does CentOS work if RHEL is really proprietary software?

(Hint: CentOS is not a RHEL »clone« – it's the same source code Red Hat uses to build RHEL, as released by Red Hat under the GPL and assorted other free-software licenses, but compiled by the CentOS people without the »Red Hat« marks.)

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Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Posted Oct 20, 2010 0:14 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

The key thing to remember here is that machine code and human readable source code are just different formats of the same program. Different variations in the program can arise from different configuration choices, but for the most part what you get in a tarball is the same as what you get after it's compiled. It's just that the compiled version is executable directly on hardware.

So the software shipping as tarballs from ftp.redhat.com and into CentOS's CDROMs is, in everything but name and labels only, Redhat ES Linux.

The justification for purchasing Redhat's support contracts is not because of the exclusivity of the features that are in the OS, but because of the exclusivity of the experience and partnerships that Redhat has developed through heavily working with third parties; Everything from government contractors, to independent businesses of all sizes, to proprietary ISVs, to GNU/Xorg/Kernel.org/etc projects.