Red Hat: 'Yes, we undercut Oracle with hidden Linux patches' Red Hat has changed the way it distributes Enterprise Linux kernel code in an effort to prevent Oracle and Novell from stealing its customers, making it more difficult for these competitors to understand which patches have been applied where. Some have speculated that the change is designed to make it harder for Oracle as well …
If you are into self-patched kernels, then shouldn't you be running Fedora not RHEL as your base? (Or a non-Red-Hat distro such as Ubuntu).
RHEL (and Centos) are about long-term stability. If it works today, you can be pretty sure it'll work in five years time, with little maintenance other than applying the security updates. People who want RHEL to be more like Ubuntu don't get this. They'd be better off switching to a distribution more to their taste, rather than complaining. Linux is NOT a Windoze monoculture!
CentOS converts = potential 100B Market cap.
Why???
8M CentOS systems.
Avg price per RHEL subscription/system $600 - just a guess.
20% of current CentOS systems converted to a RHEL Sub =1,600,000
1,600,000 x $600 = $960,000,000 /yr
Oracle is a problem but not to the same extent of CentOS, IMO
This decision creates huge upside for Red Hat shareholders but goes against the spirit of the GPL....
> CentOS converts = potential 100B Market cap.
No. CentOS users are not, in the main, candidates for conversion to RHEL. The vast majority of them are well aware of the RHEL offering, and have chosen to take a route that provides them with similar software but no support contract.
So the market cap is closer to being a few tens of thousands than the 100B you guesstimate.
> 20% of current CentOS systems converted to a RHEL Sub =1,600,000
That assumption is your mistake; you dramatically over-estimate the potential.
> Oracle is a problem but not to the same extent of CentOS, IMO
That's because you don't understand Free Software. RH are not selling code, they're selling support. CentOS is not their competitor - it is what gets people used to using RH-style systems. It is a feeder. The existence of CentOS - and other rebuilds - generates revenue for Red Hat, rather than taking it away.
Red Hat know this. That's why RH employees regularly help out anyone who is trying to rebuild their code. RH effectively sponsors all such rebuilds to a small extent. They appear happy to do so - and they are making a vast amount of money whilst following that policy.
> This decision creates huge upside for Red Hat shareholders
This decision makes no difference to RH shareholders. It's a small tweak to the way they ship code. It won't affect CentOS or any other clone-type rebuilders. It will only affect people who want to build something based on RHEL, but differing in some important fashion - which is the sort of thing I tend to do. It makes more work for me, but RH's shareholders have no reason to care about that - it really won't affect them in any way.
> but goes against the spirit of the GPL....
No, it doesn't.
RH are releasing all their source just as the GPL requires them to. What they are *not* releasing is all the annotation they've built up in their VC repository. That is unfortunate from my perspective - and I hope they change their minds when they see this having no real impact on Oracle - but it's absolutely fine as far as the GPL goes. The GPL entitles users to the source used to build their binaries, not to every thought that has gone through the developers' heads.
Vic.
Yes- we're one of the Centos users. If CentOS went away we'd not go Red Hat Enterprise. We can't afford it, and we don't require support.
We'd probably move to Ubuntu. (Fedora not long-term stable, Scientific Linux would be likely to follow in Centos's footsteps). All hypothetical at present. CentOS don't seem to be about to give up, and CentOS 5 has a few years left in it yet.
I see a number of complaints that RH is not acting in the spirit of the GPL, maybe that's true. I feel, however, that people are forgetting just what Red Hat means to FOSS and Linux.
RH has gone out of their way for years to be a great contributer and promoter of open source and linux. They have gone above and beyond all that is required by the GPL to contribute their developments to the community at large. They built a great business on this, through licensing and support costs, and even with their licensing model, they've still gone out of their way to make RH fully available to anyone who wants it. Now, they seen a trend where their efforts are being taken advantage of, and it's hurting their business. RH took appropriate actions to counter this. There is nothing in the GPL that says you have to provide a detailed change log, and documentation. I think you'll find that most FOSS projects are severely lacking in documentation. RH took action to try and stop competitors from hurting their business through some shady means. RH has acted very much in the spirit of the GPL, but they are hurting because of others who are not, and who are instead trying to take advantage of RH's openness and good participation. They have been put in a position where they are forced to stop being so open for the good of their company, and the action they've taken falls in line with just about every other FOSS project out there.
How are they being so terrible? The criticism is akin to complaining because your neighbor stopped mowing your lawn and shoveling your sidewalks for you.
@pan2008, you've got to be kidding me. Regrading this specific issue, Microsoft provides you with Windows kernel source code, source code for each patch and a patch-by-patch description? Oh, you mean they don't? How about that. If you'd RTFA that's all that's changing here, Redhat is now apparently releasing the full source for each kernel release, instead of a "stock" kernel and a seperate item-by-item set of patches with description of exactly what each patch does. And regarding support, a lot of people *don't* need support, they use CentOS. But I'm sure for a lot who do use Redhat or Oracle support, it's the same reason for a lot of support contracts -- some companies want everything they use to have a support contract attached to it.
Regrading Redhat's move. Well, I wouldn't sweat it. The full source is still there, there really is no obligation to keep a full patch history by either letter or spirit of the GPL. It seems to me Oracle really forced their hand. Finally, if some RHEL user relies on some kernel behavior odd enough they are afraid it'll be patched out, I'm sure Redhat still has patch info within the company and RHEL support can tell.
Guess ho-hum response to RH's move explains why Larry spent $7B on Sun rather than $2B on RH. Partly, anyway. I do wonder what Larry really wants from Google. Seems keen to thump them with the Java stick. Surely not as crude as chasing "Android tax", or... a favor for Steve.
RH haven't much to worry about the next few years really, there are enough SAPs to go around to keep them in business, but many of the juicier support-paying drones running Larry's software on RH - they'll go away once he starts 'squeezing'. Business software buyers and their attending court fools the DBAs will run to Larry - faster than they ran to Bill back when they gifted the office desktop to him a generation ago, back when they were mere junior accountants and snotty little PC admins respectively getting all worked up about popping a spreadsheet into a Word doc.
Big Brother, coz the pic looks a bit like Larry, and there isn't a "asteroid impact required" icon :(
I seem to remember lots of tut tutting about this sort of behaviour when the aledged chant in the corridors of MS was "DOS isn't done 'til Lotus wont run"
Once again we see ideology (Software should be Free!!!) coming up against cold hard reality (cash).
You have to sell the OS and hope that you get to support it as well, not give it away free but hobble it so that others can't offer support.
This is just ridiculous.
> I seem to remember lots of tut tutting about this sort of behaviour
No you didn't.
> when the aledged chant in the corridors of MS was "DOS isn't done 'til Lotus wont run"
That isn't even close to what is happening here.
Red Hat are *not* breaking any code. They are *not* preventing anything from running on top of the OS. They are *not* trying to influence a customer's choice of applications.
All they are doing is releasing their source code - as much of it as you want - in a single tarball. This is a step down from the previous situation, where they released a "vanilla" tarball from upstream together with a multitude of patches, with full documentation for every one of those patches.
So Red Hat is not quite as good as it used to be - but trying to claim that they are somehow deliberately breaking their code is simply not true.
> Once again we see ideology (Software should be Free!!!) coming up against cold hard reality
> (cash).
And the ideology wins. The software remains Free - as it must do under the licence. All that has changed is that Red Hat is giving away slightly less of the documentation of the source code that it has accrued.
> You have to sell the OS and hope that you get to support it as well, not give it away free but
> hobble it so that others can't offer support.
No. Red Hat demonstrates that to be incorrect - they *are* giving it away and making their money from support. They *are not* hobbling it. You or I could offer support for RH's products, if we chose to do so. Indeed, if we don't change the OS in any meaningful way, it is no harder to do that now than it ever was.
What is a little harder - and, IMO, not so much harder that this will actually make much difference - is to derive something from RHEL that is different in some important fashion. The annotations of which code has been back-ported to older kernels, for example, is no longer there - so we've got to go and look at the code to find out. This is a minor annoyance, not a significant issue.
> This is just ridiculous.
What you're alleging is certainly ridiculous - but then no-one has done it, so I don't really see your problem.
Vic.
Contrary to your article, a big proportion of Red Hat's staff don't see CentOS as an economic threat at all. Rather CentOS is something they want to encourage --- a hassle-free way to get educators hobbyists and enterprise skunkworks projects to experience RHEL without causing support issues for Red Hat Inc. The benefit of the wide availability of Red Hat skills pays off in increased support contracts. Sure there's some revenue leakage from small business -- but Red Hat Inc are a support business and the profits from those customers from selling support are not large. That's probably more than compensated by enterprise skunkworks projects moving into widespread production and seeking support contracts.
We're one organisation that is looking to abandon Oracle (Sun) for Red Hat when the next hardware is due for renewal.
This attitude is a very black mark in the book against Red Hat.
After a long time spent rebelling against closed markets and locked in solutions, this isn't going to win them any kudos in my book.
We've got equipment from one manufacturer and, to be honest, their support sucks, big time. They're an international player and what they did to their engineering force and contracts a few years ago really wrecked the support angle. What was in the can certainly wasn't written on the tin.
So we built a relationship with another company; a company which we have relied on for a good while and we're happy with their service and value for money. Any solution which threatens that long term support relationship is automatically going to get marked down as a significant step in to the unknown.
Deliberately handicapping such a relationship in order to keep business flowing in the direction of Red Hat is a massive no-no.
We run RHEL at work and I have a personal license of my own for home, even though I actually run CentOS on all my test machines there. For me this isn't a really big deal, because I'm using the centosplus kernel anyway. It *will* make things harder on the CentOS guys, and that's regrettable because they really do provide a tremendous service to the FOSS community. But if this change helps Red Hat survive, then I'm going to have to support it -- because as someone else mentioned *Red Hat* is the one who has invested in paying the salaries of hundreds of engineers who contribute back to FOSS every damn day. They're a resource I don't think we can afford to lose.
Of course I'll have to eat those words if RHAT winds up selling out to ORCL or another big player that then leeches off open source until there's nothing left to save.
It's definitely in Redhat's medium and long term interests to contribute code back upstream and encourage its adoption. The alternative is the risk of divergence in kernel development, which would be a disaster. As I see it this is only, and precisely, about screwing Oracle in the short term. It would only take a couple of months of patch lag to make them look inferior. If the Oracle parasites are slightly behind then they're less able to leech off the development and knowhow Redhat continually pushes into their product.
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