This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: Re: RedHat linux development
From: Matt Wilson <msw@redhat.com>
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 12:18:14 -0400
On Sat, Jul 01, 2000 at 08:27:38AM +1000, kevin@oceania.net wrote:
> I have a query regarding redhats involvement with the open source
> community. I ask as there has been quite a bit of RH bashing on
> our local LUG mailing list and I thought, why not ask what RH
> is doing to further the cause of linux development.
> eg What devel projects is RH involved with
> Is there any devel co-operation with XFree, ALSA ,
> ReiserFS and other projects?
I'd say that our key areas in heavy development are:
* kernel
- raid (Ingo)
- vm (Igno, Ben, sct)
- filesystem work (sct)
- VFS (Al Viro)
- sparc (Jakub Jelinek and Dave Miller)
- networking (Dave Miller, Ingo)
- everything under the sun (Alan Cox. :)
- SCSI (aic7xxx), processor optimizations (Doug Ledford)
- Linux Virtual Server (Wennsong Zhang)
* gcc
- the GCC team - everything from new targets to new backends for the
Pentium
* g++
- probably the most standards compliant C++ compiler around
* binutils
- more of the same
* glibc
- internationalization (GNU gettext) Ulrich Drepper
- everything else under the sun (Ulrich)
(important to note that a lot of Ulrich's work is done on his own
time. Your work is essential, thanks Ulrich!
* GTK+
- Owen Taylor and Tim Janik, the lead maintainers - full time work
on GTK+
- Pango - Unicode bidirectional text handling (Owen Taylor)
- GTK+-1.4 (The LABS team - Owen, Jonhathan, Havoc, Elliot)
* GNOME
- General hacking on the stuff other people don't like to finish
* CORBA
- ORBit - CORBA ORB in C, with C++, perl, python, tcl, eiffel, and
ada bindings (Elliot Lee)
* Java
- gcj - a compiler front end that converts programs written in the
Java language to native machine code, part of the gcc project
You can see, there are lots of projects that we're involved in, but
much of it is quite low level so it's often overlooked. As far as
XFree86, we're on the core team. Jakub and Dave Miller do the Sun
platform support for XFree86. We're working hard to make sure that
our X changes are getting merged upstream.
If ALSA were to be adopted by the kernel, we would probably be
contributing some sound drivers to them. As we're still using OSS,
the maestro driver was written for OSS. Alan does lots of sound
driver hacking, as most of you know.
Riser doesn't like us. We're working on ext3. All the details of
that should be hashed out on linux-kernel - there isn't anything more
to add here.
This is by no means a complete list. Just stuff I thought off of the
top of my head. Any mistakes are my own.
Cheers,
Matt
===
Subject: Re: RedHat linux development
From: Alex Kanavin <ak@cave.hop.stu.neva.ru>
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 09:34:23 +0400 (MSD)
On Sat, 1 Jul 2000 kevin@oceania.net wrote:
> eg What devel projects is RH involved with
> Is there any devel co-operation with XFree, ALSA ,
> ReiserFS and other projects?
Well, they are quite involved with gtk+ and GNOME. And they employ Alan
Cox too. I suggest you take a look at http://www.labs.redhat.com
===
Subject: Re: RedHat linux development
From: "Mike A. Harris" <mharris@meteng.on.ca>
Date: Wed, 5 Jul 2000 20:33:51 -0400 (EDT)
On Wed, 5 Jul 2000, Matt Wilson wrote:
> Matt Wilson <msw@redhat.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, 5 Jul 2000, Matt Wilson wrote:
>> >Red Hat did not develop Red Baron. It was developed by Spyglass
>> >(Spyglass Moasic anyone? :)
>Right, but remember that during this time:
>
>(1) Netscape was charging a per-copy license fee for redistribution
> that Red Hat could not afford.
Yes, very true.
>(2) Someone at Netscape decided that signing an exclusive "you have
> first rights to All Things Linux" agreement with Caldera was a
> good idea.
Hmm. I didn't know that.
>> Does redhat produce or contribute to any software at all that
>> is commercial and closed source, or uses a license that doesn't
>> comply to FSF/OpenSource guidelines?
>
>The policy is that all software written by us should be written using
>a Open Source compliant license. There was some non Open Source
>development going on at Cygnus, but all of that is changing now that
>the merger has been finished.
REALLY?? That is FANTASTIC to hear! Does this mean that we may
see some or all of the Cygnus stuff such as GNUPro toolkit
available under GPL for free? If you cannot comment on this
right now, I completely understand and will wait for the
/. announcement if need be. ;o)
>> That is more what I was interested in... just for curiousity
>> sake. Considering the amount of work RedHat does for the world
>> of open source software, and in particular GPL/LGPL software,
>> should they decide to release something under a license that was
>> not as open, I'd consider it acceptable. I suspect that that
>> won't be the case though, but would certainly respect it if it
>> happened.
>
>Well, there is one thing that we develop, but because of license
>restrictions we can't release the source. It's Secure Web Server.
Right. I guessed that one too.
>There's just no way we can do it. Our hands are tied. We can't
>afford to not have a secure web server. Hopefully things will change
>in that regard Real Soon Now.
Yeah, that is completely understandable as well. Until GPL
alternatives are on par with what you've got now, it doesn't make
sense to shoot yourself in the foot. Judging by the way redhat
has been towards free software all along, one must extrapolate
that the 'mission' is to have everything free software - or "open
source" for the catch phrase of the day..
I think in this respect, RedHat is a big leader of change indeed!
>> Yep, I remember. As soon as electric eyes was functional, it
>> replaced xv. I added xv back in on my setup because 'ee' didn't
>> do everything xv did, but I like the fact that RedHat has been
>> cleaning the distribution to be open-source pure. Once Netscape
>> is gone (if ever) and replaced by Mozilla, etc.. (if that
>> happens) then we'll be completely Open Source, no?
>
>I do believe so. We try to be careful with what goes in the "core
>distribution" of Red Hat Linux. We want you to be able to share your
>CD with your neighbor, make a copy, etc without worrying about it.
Right. I inquired with Mr. Shumanfang (sp?) a while back about
releasing my own customized redhat CD's, and he let me know the
legalities of doing so. It was much more simpler than I had
hoped. This makes life so much easier for everyone using
RedHat's products IMHO, and is a major deciding factor over other
competing products indeed.
>Similarly, we want you to be able to develop sofware using the
>development tools and libraries in the core distribution and not have
>to worry about "am I voloating a license?" That is, LGPL style
>library licenses (except for the relinking provision part - ugh) are
>preferred for that sort of stuff.
Right. My own personal preference is to write GPL software. I
do have some commercial ideas as well though, and so it is nice
to know what you can and can't do without having to jump through
hoops or hire 50 lawyers, etc..
===