Most distros use a newer kernel, and it is understandable in some respects how much backporting they do as they don’t want to break any installations with patches.

I don’t know how many changes Suse/Novell are making especially upstream. Apparently not the kernel, but they maybe making changes to other associated projects. I have seen Suse’s work pre-novell days, make it upstream. I haven’t seen much lately, but I may not be aware of it.

It would be nice if people jumped on companies like NVidia for their Tegra support. :)

Red Hat, to my knowledge, is meeting the letter of the GPL V2 license by providing the full source of their kernel. What they aren’t doing is providing the individual patch files, so a competitor can no longer pick and choose from amongst Red Hat’s patches the ones which are most appropriate for THEIR kernel.

That will not affect CENTOS nor Scientific, because both build their binaries from the “upstream vendor”s sources, which means that they could care less the provenance of an individual patch.

That said, there is something strange about RHEL6 for CENTOS and Scientific, because it’s taken both much longer to release their 6.0 distros (Scientific has finally released 6.0, but CENTOS is still working on it).

Please see: kerfluffle. Thanks.

Does this mean that CentOS will no longer be able to distribute future versions? That would be unfortunate, at least for me, but the story doesn’t address the point.

Yes, it’s a kerfuffle, a big ado over damned little. I’d say the author missed the point. And the editor should have caught the spelling error in the headline, there’s only one “L” in kerfuffle.

Van

Maybe a better argument would be that this isn’t in the spirit of Linux kernel development, but Red Hat does send its changes upstream; these patches are just backports of those. So, they’re still supporting Linux kernel development, they’re just not helping everyone else support old kernel releases. Other people are benefiting from their changes, they just don’t get them as fast as Red Hat customers, which makes perfect sense — that’s what they’re paying for.

Companies like Oracle, Novell and Canonical SHOULD be contributing to the betterment of Linux as well, not just their own respective companies. Red Hat does this more than anyone, and now that they are protecting themselves from the leaches, people are crapping on them. I understand it is common practice to do this, most projects are completed by a couple of people and everyone else gets the credit. Imagine how amazing Linux would be now if the companies that use Linux helped in building a better machine, rather then just painting over what everyone else built! Red Hat builds the machine and we all benefit from their work. Everyone else just paints over the Red Hat logo and calls it their own.

I think it’s time that these other companies are held more accountable for their upstream efforts. Part of the beauty of Open Source is that you are allowed to do this, it doesn’t make it morally right though! If you make money from something, it only makes sense to help build it. You will end up making more money the more people use it.

I know everything I’m saying will probably hit a brick wall, but I’m still saying it.