[conspire] (forw) RHEL6 source code policy change

[Rick Moen]

See http://lwn.net/Articles/429737/ about the Canonical/Amazon
'affiliate revenue' thing, if interested.

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2011 21:13:31 -0800
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: [a friend]
Subject: RHEL6 source code policy change
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

On the whole Canonical / Banshee / Amazon Store thing you pointed me to,
man, it all just seems kind of sordid.  Frankly, I don't like the whole
idea of 'affiliate revenue' getting carved by middlemen out of my
purchases anyway, so it's really difficult to determine whom I hate more
in the entire picture -- except for hating Amazon, which is a gimme.

Also:  Banshee, written for Mono.  Yuck!  Please, don't even think of 
putting that crud on my system.  Also:  Ubuntu One:  More cloud-based
computing.  Ugh.  No.  Please, take it away.






Anyway, somewhat more interesting is what's just emerged about RHEL 6.
It seems that the CEO ordered -- to the great displeasure of internal
developers, who've been ordered to keep their mouths shut -- that
RHEL6's kernel source _patches_ no longer be made freely available
outside the company.  Instead, they meet their GPL obligation by merging
all their patches flat into the upstream source, and put out the tree as
one big, fully merged tarball.  So:  As a general member of the public, 
you are no longer permitted to examine RH's kernel patches.

http://lwn.net/Articles/430098/


More:

1.  This was done specifically to spite Oracle.

2.  If you're a paying customer with a RHN subscription, you can login
to a Web interface to see the individual patches.  _However_, your
access is subject to a subscription agreement that requires you to keep
the patches confidential if you want to continue to receive technical
support.  That is, you _may_ redistribute those patches as provided
under GPLv2, but doing so violates and cuts off your subscriber
agreement.

3.  There's still (very much) an actively maintained git tree of the
kernel source + individual patches, within RH.  It's just no longer
public to anyone outside (except to RHN subscribers via the nasty Web
interface).


By the way, Oracle's kernel tree is, and remains, absolutely public with
unrestricted public git repositories.

It'll be interesting to see what CentOS and Scientific Linux do.  What
would be _really_ hilarious would be if they adopted Oracle's tree as a
standard -- or started helping them maintain it.


----- End forwarded message -----