Report on Red Hat World Tour, Boston

[Paul Iadonisi]

On Wed, 2004-03-31 at 11:40, Jeff Macdonald wrote:

[snip]

> > 
> > http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/
> > 
> 
> I'm just downloaded this. I'm curious if any one else on the list has
> played with this yet.

  I've been on the whitebox-devel list almost since the beginning.  It
was kind of funny because I had just nearly completed building RHEL3
from the source rpms and generating my own CDs before I stumbled upon
the torrent files for Whitebox.  I hadn't gone through the extra steps
(yet) of removing the Red Hat trademarks, however.
  I haven't used Whitebox (yet?) all that much, but I did install it in
a VMware session and helped to resolve some issues the developers were
having with some of the rpms.  It is very much RHEL3 with one relatively
minor tweak (aside from the trademark removal): the version of up2date
is from Fedora Core 1 so that it can access yum repositories, which are
the main method that the updates are available through.
  Here's my basic take on Whitebox: expectation management is key.  This
is not a true fork of RHEL3.  Don't expect an active 'development'
community, though there is most definitely an active 'build and test
community'.  What I mean is that the goal is most definitely to stick as
close as legally possible (i.e.: not much more than trademark removal)
to RHEL3, bugs and all.  Any bugs that are present in RHEL3 will likely
be in WBEL and remain in WBEL until/if Red Hat fixes them in RHEL3. 
Updates are built with 'rpmbuild --rebuild <package>.src.rpm' whenever
possible.
  If you join the whitebox-devel list, you will notice a small number of
annoyed contributor-wannabees.  That's not a criticism of their skills,
but of their expectations.  They expect far too much.  I've been rather
vocal about slapping them down as best I can without getting too nasty
because they are, well, NASTY.  One in particular.  This project was put
together by one person from a parish library somewhere in Louisiana with
some help from a couple others at the library.  He thought it might be a
good idea to make his work available to the world.
  He's been accused of "throwing other's work back in their faces,"
which is completely untrue.   These people want WBEL to be something it
is not.  It's basically a one man show and isn't likely to be anymore
than that.  He simply doesn't even have the time to 'manage' a community
in the way many FOSS projects are that produce what you might call a
vibrant developer community.
  The only real risk I see with WBEL is that IF Red Hat decides that it
is a threat to its business, there is a way it can impede it's
adoption.  And that is that not ALL of the software included in RHEL
(nor just about any GNU/Linux based OS) is covered by the GPL.  In fact,
significant pieces are not (Apache, Sendmail, XFree86/xorg), so Red Hat
could conceivably stop releasing the source rpms of these packages to
the world and keep its changes propriety.  Many of the other FOSS
licenses do allow this.
  Is it likely to happen?  Will Red Hat get nasty?  Even with Red Hat's
rather undesirable (to me and I'm sure others on this list), the company
still *sounds* extremely committed to always contributing back what it
does.  It *still* releases everything it owns the copyrights on under
the GPL (or LGPL when appropriate).  So I don't think it's very likely
to happen.  So it is a real risk, but I believe the risk is low.  There
would probably be a mass exodus of key developers such as Alan Cox,
David Miller, and Stephen Tweedie if Red Hat started in that direction. 
Management probably knows this.
  To me the near ideal (since I'm still a Red Hat/Fedora/Whitebox
partisan ;-)) deployment is to use RHEL where it makes sense such as
Oracle servers.  Use WBEL on development and other servers where you
don't really need vendor support and don't have certified, third party,
typically closed source (therefore, not truly self-servicable)
applications.  Mail, web, ftp, firewall servers fit this category. 
Where you need desktops, it's a toss up between the three, but for
powerusers who know what they are doing and need the latest and
greatest, Fedora makes a fine desktop.  Depending on how much outside
support, you may want to standarize on WBEL or RHEL for stability and
better chance of security problems being fixed.
  So that's my rather biased take on it all.  Take it with a grain of
salt, and with the disclosure that I am a known rpm bigot and still
somewhat of a Red Hat bigot (though not as much with last year's changes
;-)).