Ksplice and CentOS

Posted Jul 30, 2011 17:04 UTC (Sat) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)
Parent article: Ksplice and CentOS

The very last thing that the CentOS folks need to be doing is taking on more responsibilities. I had been waiting for CentOS 6, but my understanding was that the CentOS 5.6 effort was delaying it. Now, I find out that not only was the CentOS 5.6 release also delayed, but that security updates for other releases was also not happening. Sometimes is just makes sense to have a contractual agreement.

But still, I don't see a ksplice channel being attractive to folks who might require it until the CentOS project at least does a thorough and prolonged job of demonstrating that they are alive and dependable.

Sincerely,
Steve Bergman
Oklahoma City, OK (A suburb of Tuttle)

Ksplice and CentOS

Posted Aug 5, 2011 3:11 UTC (Fri) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link] (1 responses)

It's interesting that CentOS seems to claim that rebuilding RHEL is hard because they don't provide the exact build environment used.

However the GPLv2 clearly says:
"For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable"

So if RHEL can't be readily build, then informing both the FSF GPL violation contacts and Red Hat legal could be effective.

Ksplice and CentOS

Posted Aug 5, 2011 4:00 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

I think you're confusing something here. Red Hat provides the full SRPMs necessary to build any package they ship. That fully complies with the GPL's requirements, which are basically saying that you must ship the Makefiles (or the scripts that generate the Makefiles... or the scripts that generate the scripts that generate the Makefiles... or the scripts that generate the scripts that generate the scripts...).

What the CentOS folks are complaining about is that simply having a bunch of SRPMs does not make it particularly easy to build them all in the right order and to install them correctly to bootstrap a working OS image comprised of all those individual GPLed components. Requiring that would be similar to requiring that you provide the rsync scripts you use to mirror ftp.gnu.org so that end-users of your mirror can recreate it.