Comment by cyphar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cyphar | Hacker News Reader

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Well, the reason that Leap 42.1 has a 4.x kernel is because the next service pack of SLE is planned to have a 4.x kernel as well (at which point, from my understanding, they'll sync up). The reason they didn't just use the SLE kernel is because of hardware support.

But the rest of the packages are either:

1. Directly from SLE, meaning that they have the exact same version, patches and build setup (they're rebuilt on the External OBS though). These are kept up-to-date with maintenance releases for SLE (which is what I meant by "up to date").

2. Community-managed, meaning that they were not available in SLE and the community added them.

Admittedly, the kernel is the one case I know of where this is not the case. CentOS might be comparable, but I don't know whether or not RedHat actually contributes to CentOS (we contribute to OpenSUSE).

The difference between openSUSE and Fedora seems to be that openSUSE is based on SLES and Fedora is the base for RHEL. That may be different approaches, but I feel like it has very comparable results. Fedora is a community project heavily sponsored by Red Hat and open to everyone, it seems to be very similiar to openSUSE's governance model. Most things Red Hat is creating for RHEL is available in Fedora before (in fact, I cannot name any RH product that's not available in Fedora thinking about it).

> I don't know whether or not RedHat actually contributes to CentOS

CentOS is part of Red Hat (for like 1 - 2 years? Not sure).

I'm kinda irked by your original post because it seems to imply you cannot get Red Hat technology without the EULA or only by paying. That's just wrong as both CentOS and Fedora prove.

> I don't know whether or not RedHat actually contributes to CentOS

Not sure if that counts, but they hired a few of CentOS's core developers a while back (one or two years ago, I think), explicitly to make communication between RHEL developers and the CentOS people easier/faster. CentOS remains what it was before, but Red Hat now pays a few people to work on it full time.

CentOS is actually an official part of Red Hat by now[1].

[1] https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-and-c...

Thanks for the link! I was not sure how far their involvment went beyond springing for the developer salaries.

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