Salon Article on Red Hat and Cygnus

krshultz writes "Salon has a piece on Red Hat's aquisition of Cygnus Solutions. It mentions concerns that shareholders might see more dollar signs in proprietary software, and there's an interesting bit about the future of things like gcc." I didn't know gcc had a steering committee. It's nice to see its developers concerned about what all this will mean to the community.

Comments

The Future of GCC

[devphil]

Yes, GCC does have a steering committee, mainly to prevent a single person or group from exerting too much control over the project, thus paralyzing development. (The entire EGCS idea was to get away from exactly that problem, which is /why/ there was no new GCC for a long time.)

The Salon article talks about Jeff [Law] mentioning changes to the steering committee. This is the first article in the thread:

http://egcs.cygnus.com/ml/gcc/1999-11/msg00421.h tml

and the "changes" article comes later in the thread IIRC. Currently, Cygnus/RH employees together still don't have anywhere near a majority on the committee.

Should we fear Red Hat?

[bgarcia]

I'm sure we'll now see another round of everyone calling Red Hat "the next Microsoft". I was always one of the first to defend Red Hat. They have a great history of releasing everything they create under the GPL. There was absolutely no reason to expect them to do something wrong.

But I recently discovered something that now has me wondering if this will continue to be the case.

In Red Hat 6.1, there is a new program called the Red Hat Update Agent . Basically, it appears to be a program that allows you to automatically download and optionally install updated RPM's. It sounds like a wonderful new addition, and I wanted to try it out.

Well, you have to be a registered user. But that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that. They only want registered users to access their upgrade site (priority.redhat.com). I completely understand and agree with that. This is a service after all.

Because of this, I imagined that I (or anyone else) could simply setup one of these Update Agent servers myself. Knowing that Red Hat releases everything they create under the GPL, I started looking for the server-side CGI scripts.

I couldn't find them.

Now, it might just be that I didn't look hard enough. I have looked all over the FTP site, and I've tried several queries in their site's search engine. I haven't tried to actually send email to anyone at Red Hat, and I haven't actually asked anyone on a public forum (until now). But I'm still a little worried that the source for this script wasn't as easy to find as the sources for any other Red Hat software.

So, is it available? Or is Red Hat going to keep this script secret so that only registered Red Hat users can enjoy the benefits of the Update Agent?

not forking kernel

[Michael K. Johnson]

Red Hat is not creating a forked kernel; we maintain our patches as patches to Linus's kernel, allow anyone to use them, and try to push back everything that is not a customization specific to Red Hat Linux back to Linus on a time scale that he is comfortable with.

Your differentiation between "the normal kernel dev people/the kernel development team" and Red Hat does not make a lot of sense in context, because Red Hat's kernel developers are a subset of "the normal kernel dev people" and, in fact, Alan Cox, who is one of the kernel developers who work for Red Hat, is the one who does most of the kernel patch integration work for the stable kernels for Linus.

In any case, we actively integrate our patches with Linus's kernel. This is done individually by the developers working on their particular areas. The idea of maintaining a truly forked kernel is a nightmare to us, and no one in their right mind would want to do it.

So we are, in this context, just another group of highly-motivated and focused kernel hackers contributing code to the Linux kernel in the normal way, which involves maintaining patches outside the Linux kernel until Linus accepts them.

In a production context, we don't want to add patches to our official products that extend APIs beyond what Linus has blessed. The specter of us blessing an API that was subsequently cursed by the chief penguin himself would haunt us horribly.

up2date servers

[Michael K. Johnson]

We aren't keeping it secret, we just haven't released it yet because there is no product to release. What we have is mostly code that is tied into our internal systems and is not generic. We don't have a product, just a bunch of custom code...

So, we aren't going to keep the server functionality secret, it will just take time to create a release of the pieces you need to build a server. It will be released when it is ready.

In the meantime, the the protocol is documented to some extent.