[clug] RedHat OpenSource And Proprietary

[Hal Ashburner]

I believe if you have a red hat enterprise subscription of some kind
you can get source for absolutely everything they ship under a FOSS
license
They won't ship you nvidia drivers for example because it isn't FOSS.

You can't redistribute redhat trademarks and logos. But you can use a
single RHEL sub to repackage your own distribution. This is what
Centos is and where it came from.
1) Get a RHEL sub
2) Get the sources
3) strip out the redhat trademarks and logos
4) compile those sources into rpms
5) ship it.

I've personally never had a problem using Centos on a test rig to be
equivalent to an RHEL production environment.

Nobody with an opinion thinks any given distribution is perfection and
is 100% happy with every single one of the choices made by a distro
and I'm no exception. I do think RedHat do the FOSS thing right.

Maybe someone can correct me and point to some piece of code RedHat
own that they have not made available under a FOSS license, but I'm
not aware of it yet. RedHat have also employed a bunch of FOSS
developers committing to upstream repositories. One of the bigger code
contributions made by a commercial entity to the FOSS stack on the
laptop I'm using to write this email, if not the biggest. Despite the
fact that this laptop is not running RedHat, centos nor fedora.





On 11 December 2016 at 09:21, George at Clug <Clug at goproject.info> wrote:
>     I have often wondered where RedHat sits with being FOSS,
> OpenSource, and/or Proprietary
>
> So today I searched the intenet, and did not find a simple answer,
> just lots of rambling
>
> Can anyone explain to me if Red Hat is OpenSource or Proprietary. And
> how much of the proprietary code it purchases does it then open up to
> the OpenSource community?
>
> What features/programs are available in Red Hat but not in other Linux
> Distributions because these are proprietary to Red Hat?
>
> Is there a chance that Red Hat will become a different Linux which
> will not be compatible with other Linux distributions due to being
> more proprietary than OpenSource?
>
> What is the history of KVM?  I believe that Red Hat has provided this
> technology to OpenSource (FOSS?). Yesterday using Virt-Manager I tried
> to migrate a VM from CentOS to Debian and also from Debian to CentOS,
> but due to differences in environments I was not able to. This may
> only be differences in folder layouts, but are there larger
> differences?
>
> I realise that drivers for hardware that are provided by the hardware
> manufactures, are mostly not OpenSource and are proprietary, but what
> about Red Hat's proprietary code? Where does this sit?
>
> Can Red Hat code be 100% compiled from source? (excepting for hardware
> driver specific code).
>
>
>
> https://linux.org.au/introduction-linux-free-software-and-open-source
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat
>
> http://www.stromian.com/Book/Chap12.html
>
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