4 ms·

Yeah, as of a few years ago Red Hat only give access to the proper broken-out set of patches they include in their kernel to paying customers, and they make tho

by makomk 8y ago

Yeah, as of a few years ago Red Hat only give access to the proper broken-out set of patches they include in their kernel to paying customers, and they make those customers sign a contract agreeing not to distribute those patches. (They're also the only major distro who doesn't cooperate with the upstream stable releases.)

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
How is that not a GPL violation?
- kbenson 8y ago
  The source code is released, it's just the formatting that has changed. Presumably the contract is around the extra effort RedHat puts into making the source nice and easily manageable by providing what they used to by default, a pristine kernal and a bunch of patches to apply. The normal method now is that they provide a large, pre-patches kernel source, which is then built. In both cases, the same code source is used for building,it's just the transformations before the building which are different, so that's likely how it doesn't violate the GPL. The GPL says the source must be shipped, but it makes no provisions for how easy it is to read. It's sort of like if you shipped a JS lib as minified to comply with the GPL, but have a separate non-minified version to develop on in-house. In the end, it doesn't stop anyone from downloading and compiling their own RedHat kernel as CentOS does, and Oracle Linux did(does?), but it does make it harder (not impossible) for Oracle to come in to RHEL customers and say "hey, stop your RHEL contracts, and pay us instead, and we'll support your systems without you having to reinstall." which is capitalizing on RedHat's packaging and testing work.
  - lathiat 8y ago
    Oracle then started a project to break them back out again. Last update seems to be November 2017 though. https://oss.oracle.com/projects/RedPatch/ https://oss.oracle.com/projects/RedPatch/

4 ms·

Yeah, as of a few years ago Red Hat only give access to the proper broken-out set of patches they include in their kernel to paying customers, and they make tho

by makomk 8y ago

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
How is that not a GPL violation?
- kbenson 8y ago
  The source code is released, it's just the formatting that has changed. Presumably the contract is around the extra effort RedHat puts into making the source nice and easily manageable by providing what they used to by default, a pristine kernal and a bunch of patches to apply. The normal method now is that they provide a large, pre-patches kernel source, which is then built. In both cases, the same code source is used for building,it's just the transformations before the building which are different, so that's likely how it doesn't violate the GPL. The GPL says the source must be shipped, but it makes no provisions for how easy it is to read. It's sort of like if you shipped a JS lib as minified to comply with the GPL, but have a separate non-minified version to develop on in-house. In the end, it doesn't stop anyone from downloading and compiling their own RedHat kernel as CentOS does, and Oracle Linux did(does?), but it does make it harder (not impossible) for Oracle to come in to RHEL customers and say "hey, stop your RHEL contracts, and pay us instead, and we'll support your systems without you having to reinstall." which is capitalizing on RedHat's packaging and testing work.
  - lathiat 8y ago
    Oracle then started a project to break them back out again. Last update seems to be November 2017 though. https://oss.oracle.com/projects/RedPatch/ https://oss.oracle.com/projects/RedPatch/