wardmundy -
I suspect that, better than most, you have an inkling of where the whole Centos/Red Hat thing will wind up. My question is whether someone is going to have to sue or get sued before this is all settled? At this point, there seems to be no clear guideline as to what is or is not "legal" short of buying a licensed version of a product. I agree with your interpretation at this point but it seems to be a grey area nonetheless. Red Hat is making this way too Micro$oft like for my tastes and I worry if the foundation of our PIAF house is getting shaky.
Is Ubuntu more of a safe haven than Enterprise Linux? What about Scientific Linux or the host of other varieties of Linux out here? I'm getting a little concerned about the big picture as the Centos debacle progresses. I'm also surprised not to have seen comment from Digium on any of this.
Tom has addressed the Ubuntu issue, and I'm not sure that would solve our long-term problem. Some of this is just going to take some time. First of all, Red Hat doesn't (yet) have a registered trademark to CentOS, and that issue is really up in the air IMHO given the CentOS acquiescence to all of this over a very long period of time. Second, if you've been following the
Nerd Vittles comments about this, there is plenty of FUD to go around. Every Fan Boy is a One Hit Wonder Expert, and then each of them fades into the night. What's consistent in all of their comments is
NOTHING other than the fact that they love Red Hat. If you like Apple fan boys, you'd love some of the comments I didn't publish.
Edit: The Ubuntu option also is shot down in
this post.
Here's where I think we are for the time being. We will have an installer out shortly that will let you create a PIAF3 platform exactly like 2.0.6.5 after you have initially created a base install using CentOS 6.5, Scientific Linux 6.5, and (down the road) perhaps others such as the new Schmooze ISO and Fedora. Following that release, we will work on either creating a Scientific Linux 6.5-based PIAF ISO or a pure PIAF ISO with our own OS or maybe both. More surprises coming tonight!
In the meantime, we'll be participating in the USPTO process on the CentOS trademark, and we will try to work something out with RedHat on their interpretation of the GPL. They now are hinting at supporting CentOS "spins" if you recall that same methodology with Fedora. What we're after is a release that sets up a LAMP stack and enables DHCP networking with a collection of standard RPMs out of the CentOS repo. Nothing fancy or proprietary! We just don't want folks to have to download a 3.5 GB file to install a LAMP stack. Once you have a base install, we would run the PIAF3 installer. We'd prefer that the installer run on reboot by embedding a command in rc.local, but we could probably live without that. Either way PIAF continues to run atop some Linux platform.
None of this is really that difficult! It gets complicated by fanaticism, turf wars, personal attacks, and the typical us vs. them B.S. Dealing with programmers on this sort of stuff could take about 100 years to sort out. Once we can sit down with program managers and just talk about the issues, one morning meeting will probably suffice. So hang in there. The world will not end.
Phone System 