What did I do to win ? I just attended LinuxWorld NL :-) I don't know exactly if this was based on luck or whether I was subscribed to some of their presentations or whether I met Jo De Baer to thank him for his help on mrepo's youget. Maybe all three of them ?

But this is what I got in my mailbox last week:

The attached note below says:

Congratulations, you have won a book.

Fabian pointed to an interesting article from a Red Hat engineer about CentOS and Red Hat's position. An interesting question popped up that I asked myself before: "Why is there no SLES alternative distribution ?". Given all the benefits a free Enterprise Linux brings to Red Hat, Novell must be eager to want to tap into this resource, right ?

One comment suggested that Novell did not release SRPMs and therefor it was impossible to create a free SLES clone. Reality seems a bit different: Novell does release SRPMs.

There are a few reasons why there is no Open Source SLES alternative.

Yes! After a few weeks of wanting this I finally took the time to write it. With the help from Jo De Baer I wrote YOU (Yast Online Update) support for mrepo.

mrepo works with helper-tools for the actual downloading of updates or creation of metadata and so the real meat is inside the tool called youget.