what centos and oracle “jump through hoops” for

Referencing Greg who is referring to a post by Mark Shuttleworth. Mark Says:

“That’s why Oracle’s having to jump through hoops to produce Unbreakable Linux (bless ‘em). That’s why users are required to pay for the privilege of using RHEL.”

I have some idea of what the Centos and the Oracle teams are doing to rebuild rhel. The Centos team takes the srpms, strip out Trademarks and logos. Build them into binaries and verify dependency and library compatibility against the Red Hat Binaries.

The oracle team takes the centos rebuilds and put the oracle logos and trademarks on them. 🙂

The hoop jumping has nothing to do with the source or with anything being copyrighted in a special way. It has only to do with Trademarks. Furthermore red hat has made the rebuilding process even easier b/c they’ve adopted fedora packaging standards for their packages. This means no unspecified dependencies in packages. Everything not in the base build set is explicitly defined in the spec file.

Seriously, if you’re going to talk out of your ass about what oracle and centos are doing in order to achieve a functional distribution do a TINY amount of research.