McGrath: Red Hat’s commitment to open source

Posted Jun 27, 2023 11:42 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: McGrath: Red Hat’s commitment to open source by thebluesgnr
Parent article: McGrath: Red Hat’s commitment to open source

>> Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents
>> a real threat to open source companies everywhere.

>Ehh, this is exactly what a Linux distribution is.

Nope, otherwise competitors would have no problem restarting from upstream sources, instead of complaining bitterly Red Hat makes it harder to copy all the stuff it added over upstream sources to make them build and run reliably.

Why bother cloning something if it adds no value over public upstream ?

Distributions add a hell of a lot of value over raw upstream sources in the form of finding the build settings that actually work, finding the versions combinations that actually work, testing the result at scale on multiple hardware architectures and wrapping it all in an uniform deployment format so end users are not exposed to differences of dev opinion on how stuff should build.

(I intentionally omit all the bug fixing and other dev work distributions also perform, because even if upstream code was perfect and without a bug there would still be a huge value on the other non dev stuff performed distro-side).

McGrath: Red Hat’s commitment to open source

Posted Jun 27, 2023 14:12 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

As an aside, note that much of Red Hat's stuff added over upstream sources is available in https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/ - while this isn't everything in RHEL, the difference only matters if you're either not keeping on top of security-relevant changes upstream yourself, or if it really really matters that you're on the same package version as RHEL N.M, and not on the version that's going to be part of RHEL N.M+1 or RHEL N+1.