Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

> 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.