[Pc_Support] Generic Linux question ....

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Sun, 2005-12-11 at 14:31 -0600, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
> .... Several years back (late '90's) I had the impression that SuSE was 
> somewhat disdained by some geeks for their practice of making 
> alterations to kernel (& possibly other) code in their distro.

SuSE vehemently protected its trademark, something that Red Hat didn't
and ultimately paid the price for.  It's about trademark, first and
foremost, everything else is just looking at the details.

> I *think*  that most of the other 'big boys' (RH, Mandrake, maybe others)
> now do this as well.

Red Hat is the one that came to a point where, because of what Sun did
(based on Cobalt), Microsoft would have legal rights to use Red Hat(R)
had Red Hat not moved to finally protect it.

It didn't matter how many times Red Hat revised its guidelines to allow
duplicators to continue using their name -- Cheapbytes.COM being an
explicit one -- they were demonized by the same.  Which is why I no
longer buy from Cheapbytes.COM, they were very political in the non-
sense they did, after Red Hat explicitly granted exceptions on the
trademark for duplicators.

> They are mostly back-porting newer stuff from newer 
> kernels, as I understand it, but their kernels are nonetheless not 
> identical & possibly incompatible with other binary packages because of 
> these alterations. It is also considered unwise to try to use "vanilla" 
> kernels from kernel.org with these distros because of possible/likely 
> incompatibilities. Does anyone have a quick synopsis or a link on who 
> does what to their kernels, distro-by-distro ? TIA :-).

Nope, because it varies widely.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org
http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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