I'm fine with this - this is within Oracle's rights. It goes against what we've come to expect with regards to Linux and GPL projects in general - but it's per

I'm fine with this - this is within Oracle's rights. It goes against what we've come to expect with regards to Linux and GPL projects in general - but it's perfectly valid. Oracle is under no obligation to provide source patches back to anyone, with any additional meta-info. They are only required to provide unobfuscated source for the binaries they distribute - which they are doing. Think of it as a big kernel fork that runs it's project a different way. The community is free to analyze and take back what they want - that's all the GPL is about. If they had actually obfuscated the CODE to make it unreadable, that would be another matter possibly - but while not providing patches and possibly stripping comments, etc, is a form of obfuscation to the outside community, it's not code obfuscation. It's too bad they did this.. it's probably some paranoid manager at Oracle thinking this will make a big difference... but there's nothing wrong with it. you are free to take the current kernel, hack away on it all you want and just provide new copies whenever you release, without talking to, explaining, or helping anyone with anything, as long as you stick to the GPL.