Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source [LWN.net]

Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Posted Mar 1, 2011 10:44 UTC (Tue) by ekj (guest, #1524)
In reply to: Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source by jspaleta
Parent article: Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Not really. Making source available to everyone, is generally more convenient than making it available just to your own customers. The former is trivial, whereas the latter requires tracking customers for a minimum of 3 years, and implementing access-control so that each customer gets access to the right stuff. That's work-for-nothing in the case of GPLed sources, because if they *did* that, someone would mirror the sources publicly anyway.

Thus I don't consider "source to everyone" some sort of huge gift over "source to the customers" -- the former is a lot simpler and cheaper than the latter. (bandwith is -also- cheap these days - *especially* for Open Source software where it's generally easy to get mirrors for free)

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Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Posted Mar 1, 2011 13:19 UTC (Tue) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link] (3 responses)

Not really. You can just give the customer the binaries and the source in the same deal. I.e., you get binaries + source, even if you don't ask for source. Ditto for any updates. No need to keep track of anything extra this way.

Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Posted Mar 3, 2011 1:28 UTC (Thu) by dag- (guest, #30207) [Link] (2 responses)

Indeed, and Red Hat already has the distribution mechanism for their customers (already offering these SRPM packages), called Red Hat Network. So offering only to customers would actually be easier than making sure they also hit the FTP site and mirrors.

I guess we can drop that from the list of conspiracies :-)

Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Posted Mar 3, 2011 7:09 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link] (1 responses)

It wasn't a conspiracy, but merely an observation.

The observation was, that online, the extra work involved in offering sourcecode to everyone - over offering it only to customers, is typically very little, and it can even be easier to offer it to everyone.

Thus, very little gratitude is required for going "above and beyond" the duties by giving sourcecode to everyone, rather than just customers. Yeah it's an advantage, but it's a tiny contribution. (even if they -did- give the source only to customers, free-for-all mirrors of these source-packages would spring up in a matter of days automagically.)

RedHat does however do many things that are significant positive contributions to the Open Source community, for example several paid employees of theirs are regular contributors to central projects.

Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Posted Mar 3, 2011 10:16 UTC (Thu) by dag- (guest, #30207) [Link]

> The observation was, that online, the extra work involved in offering sourcecode to everyone - over offering it only to customers, is typically very little, and it can even be easier to offer it to everyone.

And my response was that they now are already offering it "only to customers" through RHN. So there's no cost for them to stop offering it to everyone, if they wanted to. Of course, Red Hat has generally benefited from the RHEL-rebuild scene and the wide availability of RHEL-rebuilds in markets Red Hat is not targeting is making RHEL very attractive. That's why I always described the Red Hat/CentOS relation as a symbiosis.

> (even if they -did- give the source only to customers, free-for-all mirrors of these source-packages would spring up in a matter of days automagically.)

Then one can only wonder why this never happened for Novell, which did only offer source-packages to customers. No free-for-all mirrors ever appeared, despite a demand from the community, and hence no community SLES project.