McGrath: Red Hat’s commitment to open source

A Linux distribution does far more than "rebuilding code", even if 100% of the source they use is available in the various upstreams.

They select components to use, figure out the dependencies, package it all as a coheseive whole, handle security updates and bug fixes and often add quite a bit of their own code. This is true for all distributions both commercial and community. And all of that is a *lot* of work.

I agree with Red Hat that *pure rebuilding* of an already created distribution without changing or adding anything doesn't add any value. On the other hand I don't agree that it is necesarilly a "threat to open source companies everywhere". A company that just does support wouldn't be threatened by rebuilders - their money comes from support contracts that are paid by those that want them. The problem for Red Hat is that they don't want to be (just) a support company but effectively sell a distribution. Rebuilders do threaten that model by reducing the number of customers.