Distrowatch reports that White Box Enterprise Linux 3.0 (WBEL) was born from the ashes of Red Hat Linux, to fill the gap between Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is meant to remain close enough to the original RHEL to share its errata, SRPMS, binary modules, and 3rd party packages.
White Box Enterprise Linux 3.0 Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Finally nobody has to pay redhat! hopefully they will fire their army of coders since they can not be paid and we can go back to running junk!
Next someone make a clone of SuSe, or is that illegal? Nobody should make money ever.
<end sarcasim>
imitation is the greatest form of flattery. Mandrake (everything), SuSe (RPM), Debian (Anaconda), Knoppix (kudzu), and countess others have grabbed thier peice of Redhat now another does it. My point is alot of great things come from this OSS company why do we insist on copying everything they do instead of paying them?
>why do we insist on copying everything they do instead of paying them?
Because we can. It is Free Software.
Besides, copying doesn’t isn’t a big problem for Red Hat, their money come from support costs, so the companies who need support will still go with Red Hat.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Perhaps you missed the article about Microsoft copying Linux:
http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2444/031216msunit/
How about the fact the when Sun started out their version of unix was BSD? Are these bad things? No. Now there is a big difference about corps taking from open source/gpl and gpl taking from gpl. But alas this will not be resolved on a posting board.
The reason of WhiteBox Linux is being able to use redhat’s updates. Now these updates are provided in .src.rpm, but could they be pulled out of public access? if it’s done, would it have any sense having WhiteBox Linux?
Otherwise, I think WhiteBox Linux is great and provides a stable platform for non-paying users and developers.
“One immediate problem will be bandwidth. The Beauregard Parish Library is a small parish (county) library in rural Louisiana with a single lowly T-1 connection to the world. Even with BitTorrent, serving up six or seven full ISO images will get insane very fast if the word spreads very far.”
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Perhaps you missed the article about Microsoft copying Linux:
http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2444/031216msunit/
How about the fact the when Sun started out their version of unix was BSD? Are these bad things? No. Now there is a big difference about corps taking from open source/gpl and gpl taking from gpl. But alas this will not be resolved on a posting board.
1) How on gods green earth is http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2444/031216msunit/ copying Linux? Solaris has always been developed this way. The Solaris development is split into various groups, each specialising in a particular area. This as a result creates focus for each group.
Why is it everytime there is Linux we have some nutcase who brings up, “[company] is copying linux”. Bloody hell, there is NOTHING original in Linux, just as there is NOTHING original in Windows. Everything, I mean EVERYTHING in the IT world is based on accamedic theory. I can’t *WAIT* till 2.6 is released and we have every fuckle knuckle out there stating that because Linux 2.6 has “pre-emption”, obviously it was a Linux “innovation”.
Get a clue and get your head out of your ass. Linux isn’t the fountain of innovation and stop trying to make out it is.
2) Sun has contributed ALOT back to the BSD projects, and darn sight more than IBM, SGI, HP and every other Linux clingon and tag along has done to the so-called “linux effort”. Maybe you should educate yourself a little about SUN and actually realise that SUN has been the opensource and openstandard communities best friend before this whole linux hype came along.
SUN employees have been using Linux before we had Lou Gestner jumping around the stage like a kangaroo stating this it was the future direction of IBM. The same Lou Gestner who created their service wing at the expense of their software and hardware divisions. The same Lou Gestner who ran Nabisco in the ground via a frantic and misguided acquisition fad.
Wow… guess what: RH did *not* code the contens of 5 CDs themselves, they took the work of others, as Eugenia put it, because they *can*. That’s the game. Why should free software stop being free, only because some people decided to make money off of it..?! You are crazy.
own redhat stock?
chill out.
plus, you can’t blame people. this century will be known as the “crack dealer ploy”
undercut your competitors, even if you have to PAY your customers to use your product, then when you have outlived your competitors, start charging.
microsoft didn’t write the book on this ploy, but man oh man did they ever break the mold.
redhat has done the same. make a better product then their competitors, give it away….and at the key moment, start charging.
it’s the american dream.
and it’s a sword you can die by, just as easily.
and your sarcastic self, whining and complaining ain’t gonna change a thing.
Red Hat is selling service, the entire Red Hat package. They explicitly support free copying of their enterprise software and it’s all completely free software (it would be trivial for them to change that, like many other distributions do unfortunately).
They only don’t want their brand beeing sold and promoted by someone else, so you have to do something like Whitebox Linux. That’s absolutely the point of it and not really different from the Mandrake clone back then (only, that it’s not even a commercial project this time).
In other words, Red Hat will certainly not get angry.
I respect them a lot for that.
>How on gods green earth is [link] copying Linux?
>Why is it everytime there is Linux we have some nutcase who
>brings up, “[company] is copying linux”.
Why on God’s green Earth don’t people read the article before posting a comment on OSNews?
Please note this comment, in that article, from analyst Rob Enderle: “They have been studying Linux extensively. Part of their study has been on how Linux has been able to maintain a high level of consistency in the kernel while groups around it maintain maximum flexibility…”
Agree, disagree, but this is why “some nutcase” is bringing it up. It’s in the article. Get over it.
>imitation is the greatest form of flattery…
>countess others have grabbed thier peice of Redhat now
>another does it. My point is alot of great things come from
>this OSS company why do we insist on copying everything
>they do instead of paying them?
OSNews presents… Comment time-warp from 1994!
It’s called Open Source. See, they get to build their distro based on code developed by the community. In exchange, they’re expected to be good citizens and release their changes back to the community, especially when particular licenses require it.
True, this leaves them a little vulnerable: anyone can just come along, at any time, and “clone” their distribution (in other words, barriers to competition are low). Which is why they’ve built a brand, and why their business is based upon value-adds like support, training, ISV certification, etc.
Versions are seposed to start at 1.0
They try to keep it in sync with Red Hat’s Enterprise versioning, as this software is actually it.
Is it just me or is the “howto” (“roll your own”) page
at http://www.beau.org/~jmorris/linux/whitebox/howto.html
a bit vague ? You have to install taroon beta, track down some missing packages, re-build taroon beta using its own RPMs,
build all the src RPMs for RHEL3 (oh except a few that you have to do “manually”), remove trademarked stuff (an “incomplete” list is provided) and then do a load of hand-rolling of ISO images.
Is it just me or shouldn’t this whole process from start to finish be scripted to run unattended [a bit like a Gentoo-style build] ? Then we could indeed “roll our own” and “trust” our version a bit more ? I can’t see any company ever trusting White Box enough without such a process where they can download RH’s stuff directly, study the scripts and then set off a 2-day build to create the ISOs.
“My point is alot of great things come from this OSS company why do we insist on copying everything they do instead of paying them?”
The real question is why don’t they pay Linus and Co. for putting in all the work on the kernel, and then pay the GNU for their part and then pay Ximian for Gnome, etc.
There are 4 high bandwidth FTP mirrors and iso’s are also distributed via bittorrent….bandwidth so far has not been a problem.