Real benefits of RHEL over Fedora?

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Monday 06 June 2011 16:27:19 JB wrote:
> Ian Pilcher <arequipeno <at> gmail.com> writes:
> > ...
> > RHEL is 100% open source (based on the OSI definition).
> > ...
> 
> Are you sure about it ?
> 
> I believe I have read it on a CentOS list that one of the reasons (perhaps
> the main one) they are so late with 6.0 release is that they think RHEL
> packages are compiled against software (libraries ?) that are part of
> their build process but are not officially released as part of RHEL 6.0 .

Those libraries are also open source, just different versions, with custom 
patches, etc. They don't get bundled in the 6.0 release because some other 
libraries substitute for them.

The fact that CentOS 6 is late has to do with several factors, one of which is 
that the 6.0 build environment has to be reverse-engineered. That is what you 
have read on the CentOS list. Red Hat is by no means required to release the 
details of their build environment, just the actual source code of the distro. 
If you want to compile that source code, you have to figure out (yourself) in 
what order and against which versions of which libraries should the packages 
be compiled. It's a trial and error process, essentially.

All this has nothing to do with licencing. I give you the source code, but I 
don't tell you how to compile it (and there is more than one way to do it, 
btw) --- figure it out yourself. Everything is still open source. ;-)

HTH, :-)
Marko