On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Andrew Joakimsen
Is Novell really against an free (as in beer) clone of SLES, and would they do anything to stop us? What are the legal considerations, namely: what parts of SLES are not distributed under the GPL or other open licenses? How much work would it take to build such a distribution?
Novell understands open source licensing and participates willingly in
the Linux and open source community, and contributes to the same. That
means accepting the responsibilities and rights that come with the
FOSS licenses, as well as getting the benefit of those licenses.
Is Novell against a clone of SLES? So long as the licensing (copyright
& trademark) is respected and the downstream project that produces
said clone follows its obligations, why would it be? I think there are
a variety of opinions within Novell as to whether a CentOS-like
distribution would be good, bad, or indifferent for Novell and SUSE.
There are possible benefits and drawbacks, and I'm not sure anyone can
point to reliable data about the effects of CentOS on Red Hat, much
less on the effects of a clone on Novell's SUSE business. (If you can,
please let me know...) I can say Novell is unlikely to focus any
significant resources to a clone at this time.
I think pretty much all of SLES fits under one of the OSI-approved licenses.
How much work would it take? There's the real question that this group
should be asking itself before dreaming up names and taking votes,
etc.
If you look at CentOS, not to mention all the now-defunct projects
that have tried to do rebuild RHEL or provide longer-term support for
Fedora, it's a fair amount of work to build and keep current a
distribution even when someone else is creating all the SRPMs.
One minor factoid: Red Hat released RHEL 5.2 May 21st, 2008. The
corresponding CentOS release (5.2) was announced June 24th. Red Hat
released RHEL 5.3 on January 20, 2009, CentOS dropped the 5.3
announcement on April 1st. (No joke...) Package updates happen faster
than that, of course - I think there's usually a lag of a few days to
a week from when Red Hat releases a package and the corresponding
CentOS package is released. I seem to recall an article on LWN that
examined this, but my memory and Google-fu are not serving me very
well this Saturday morning.
A clone effort would require several people to keep the packages up to
date, some people to maintain and configure the build systems, and
resources in terms of providing build hosts and mirrors. An openSUSE
"LTS" maintained by the community would require packagers and
developers who are willing to continue maintaining packages that are
18+ months old, for free. I haven't seen much evidence to date that
this is something volunteers are clamoring to do. The Fedora Legacy
project attempted this, managed it for a couple of years, and finally
ran out of steam.
Best,
Zonker
--
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier