8 ms·

Red Hat's response to the "obfuscated" source code accusations

71 points by TomasSedovic 16y ago

originalgeek 16y ago
I'm unsure what the benefit to Red Hat is in this case. All a competitor need do is become a "customer" by buying a copy of RHEL 6, and then Red Hat is compelled by the GPL to distribute all of their patches to that "customer". Seems like more of a PR gaffe to me, than an effective countermeasure against the competition gaining access to their code.
- anonymous246 16y ago
  Redhat is not obligated to take on anybody and everybody as a customer.
- wmf 16y ago
  I think this was discussed on LWN; if you get the patches from Red Hat and redistribute them, Red Hat will cancel your service contract. So it could work, but only once.
  - ebiester 16y ago
    one fake company after another. So long as it's still cheaper for Oracle to maintain the fake companies, they'll do it.
  - originalgeek 16y ago
    Thanks, I don't keep up on LWN. It seems to me then, that Red Hat has created their own fork of the kernel. Am I overreacting?
    - wmf 16y ago
      That has been going on forever. I remember the days when Red Hat was shipping a "2.4" kernel that had all the features from 2.6 backported into it. They're still submitting the patches upstream, so if you want an "unobfuscated" kernel tree you can get it from Linus.
- scott_s 16y ago
  I think you're unclear on what is not being shared. From what I understand, old version of RHEL had a vanilla kernel, and then an RPM with RH patches to that kernel, as well as the documentation for those patches. New versions of RHEL will not have a vanilla kernel; it will only contain a kernel with their patches pre-applied. Documentation for those patches will only be available to subscribers. The code is not being treated as the commodity, but the documentation for that code.
  - TheAmazingIdiot 16y ago
    So, corporations with deep pockets (read Oracle) can buy the subscription through a proxy and have full access to the individual patches and full documentation. The rest of us independent and poor hackers cannot afford it and we suffer. Yeah, good idea RedHat. And yes, I know the GPL does not compel them to be nice.
- yuhong 16y ago
  Yea, SAP bought TomorrowNow which did exactly this. Fortunately they did it against proprietary software so Oracle was able to sue.
- koenigdavidmj 16y ago
  I have heard but not validated that RH contracts have a clause that if you ask for the source, they give it to you and then promptly cut your support contract.
  - maw 16y ago
    The source is available: see ftp.redhat.com:/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/6Server/en/os/SRPMS for instance. Maybe explicitly asking for the source is considered different somehow from just ftping it, but I doubt it very much.
TomasSedovic 16y ago
I'm posting this to add a continuation to the story about Red Hat having changed the way they release their RHEL 6 kernel: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2272535 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2272535 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283188 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283188 If anyone actually cares about this: disclaimer -- I work for Red Hat. Not on RHEL.
naner 16y ago
Here's the meat since 80% of the article is PR blabbering and we all already know who Red Hat is: When we released RHEL 6 approximately four months ago, we changed the release of the kernel package to have all our patches pre-applied. Why did we make this change? To speak bluntly, the competitive landscape has changed. Our competitors in the Enterprise Linux market have changed their commercial approach from building and competing on their own customized Linux distributions, to one where they directly approach our customers offering to support RHEL. Frankly, our response is to compete. Essential knowledge that our customers have relied on to support their RHEL environments will increasingly only be available under subscription. The itemization of kernel patches that correlate with articles in our knowledge base is no longer available to our competitors, but rather only to our customers who have recognized the value of RHEL and have thus indirectly funded Red Hat’s contributions to open source that will advance their business now and in the future. TL;DR: Competition is hard, especially when we are "open" and everyone else is not, so we adopted our competitors' tactics.
- GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
  I was reading that and at the pre-last paragraph just thought "has my brain just gotten hit in the balls?" "We're committed to open source ... open source makes the best code in the world ... were innovators in open source ... we just decided to give ourselves a competitive advantage" ... WTF!? Its like in one breath he snuck it in. Bullcrap.
  - rufugee 16y ago
    How exactly is RedHat not showing a commitment to open source? Do they invest in open source? CHECK. Do they contribute to the adoption of open source? CHECK. Are they abiding by the open source licenses that govern the use of the open source on which they rely? CHECK. All they have done in this case is make a legal, wise, and likely necessary move to protect themselves. Nothing they have done damages the kernel or prevents you from getting it. Nothing they have done damages any other OS projects. Sounds like you've got a whole mouthful of sour grapes there...
    - 16y ago
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- sgift 16y ago
  Maybe, but if your competitors are dicks and you don't react you may find yourself on the path to Chapter 11.
marshray 16y ago
Props to Red Hat for not putting out a bunch of BS pretending like it's not really what it really is.
- yuhong 16y ago
  It is not enough to be PR 2.0 compliant, which requires ending of control over the message, but it does ensure that adoption is much easier.
flyt 16y ago
This PR statement unfortunately fails to address the knock-on effects to the CentOS project that this will have.
- flink 16y ago
  It was discussed in the CentOS forums, though: https://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=29147&start=280 https://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=... To quote the forum thread: The CentOS kernel is just a rebuild, so there is no problem there. In the case of the centosplus kernel, because it may add patches, some extra steps might be needed. But again, that is not a major issue. Disclosure: I do work for Red Hat, but not on RHEL. Just posting info I saw earlier.
- bernardwilson 16y ago
  Would it not be possible to compute what patches have been applied? I'd guess for many patches it'd be trivially easy to determine if they were in or out; for the rest a brute-force search could be done...
  - burgerbrain 16y ago
    "for the rest a brute-force search could be done..." Huhwhat? Brute force: A + B + C = D, where D and A are known.
    - pyre 16y ago
      I'm assuming the parent was talking about publicly available patches, not internally developed Red Hat ones. In that case, you could determine B and C out of a list of possible values by brute-forcing.
    - bernardwilson 16y ago
      No, some of Bs will be known as they're public patches. the remaining aggregate of C would be 'redhat patch to 2.6.x-y'.
- nas 16y ago
joe_the_user 16y ago
Red Hat:"Essential knowledge that our customers have relied on to support their RHEL environments will increasingly only be available under subscription." FSF: "the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its user" However necessary Red Hat might consider this move to be, it is just as clearly a move away from the spirit of the GPL however much it may conform to the letter of the GPL. At the same time, open source companies need to compete on some basis and hiding information seems to be one basis. Is there an alternative to this? (serious question)
- mapleoin 16y ago
  You have all of the freedom to change the code that you always had. The code is exactly the same, but instead of being released in small chunks, it's released in one big tarball. The commit splitting and commit messages could be considered documentation, they are not part of the code and not covered by any license.
- dedward 16y ago
  The "Spirit" of the GPL argument has never rung true with me. It's not about creating shared projects and having big hippie hacker sit-ins. It's about keeping CODE free. This is a perfectly legitimate move by Redhat. It's unfortunate that they felt they needed to do this, but they are under no obligation to provide source code to anyone other than those to whom they distribute, and the GPL certainly doesn't force them to support anyone at all - they want to support paying customers. It's not a move away from the spirit of the GPL in any way.
xilun0 16y ago
> Red Hat often talks about upstream first, the practice of openly developing kernel features and bug fixes as part of the most recent upstream kernel before we ship them in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We know the value of getting code open from day one, debating it in the public forum, and letting it mature through a cycle long before it reaches our customers’ data centers. As the kernel community is well aware, it is standard practice for Red Hat to submit fixes that we find in supporting our customers. [...] > Why did we make this change? To speak bluntly, the competitive landscape has changed. [...] > but rather only to our customers who have recognized the value of RHEL and have thus indirectly funded Red Hat’s contributions to open source that will advance their business now and in the future. Translation : RH believes in the shared source model as initiated by MS, and not in the free software model were knowledge is valuable and should not be hidden, and were new advanced are done on the shoulders on giants. From now on, I consider RH as a traitor for the free software community, and will handle it like that (unless they change their unacceptable behaviour)
- sigzero 16y ago
  You are a bad translator and your attitude is perplexing. RH is conforming 100% to the GPL.
sagarun 16y ago
There is nothing wrong in what Red Hat did. I heard that some customers indeed bought oracle's unbreakable Linux, but switched back to RHEL after experiencing oracle's crappy support. The wonderful thing about Free and open source software is support being not a monopoly. You don't have to depend on one person. Oracle's offering will make RHEL and its support team much better and competitive.
jwcacces 16y ago
And that's how you make yourself irrelevant....
dasht 16y ago
Sustaining an artificial scarcity of high quality integrated OS releases has been what RHAT has been about since the beginning. Why is this new move any surprise?
- mapleoin 16y ago
  I wonder which of Red Hat's actions make you think that they're trying to create an artificial scarcity. There are hundreds of other ditros. How does Red Hat keep them from creating a quality product?
  - dasht 16y ago
    By not sharing software work that is easily shared. They love to draw from upstream but they share only those parts of their infrastructure that don't threaten scarcity.
    - pyre 16y ago
      Why not list actual complaints? So far you've just been making generalizations. What software are they not sharing? Are they violating the GPL?
asdfor 16y ago
TL;DR: We found a loophole on the license, we are going to abuse it , Problem ??? :trollface:
Getahobby 16y ago
Hmm, sounds like Redhat is really looking for a BSD type license.
aphexairlines 16y ago
Here's why Red Hat has to do this: http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto041820061306424713 http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto041820061... Financial Times: Is open source going to be disruptive to Oracle? Larry Ellison: No. If an open source product gets good enough, we'll simply take it. Take [the web server software] Apache: once Apache got better than our own web server, we threw it away and took Apache. So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it – a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that's what we'll do.
- rfugger 16y ago
  And as open source slowly eats into their proprietary products, they have less and less to differentiate themselves from any other software company, and it becomes harder to lock customers in to their platform.
  - pyre 16y ago
    Oracle will have plenty to differentiate themselves from 'any other software company.' Even if all they are offering is support, they are a trusted brand name among middle-management.
simplon 16y ago
The site seems to be down..
chris_j 16y ago
Anyone else see this? "redhat.com is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later." I was starting to wonder if the controversy surrounding this had taken their site down but the article is still there, a few screens down.

71 points by TomasSedovic 16y ago

I'm unsure what the benefit to Red Hat is in this case. All a competitor need do is become a "customer" by buying a copy of RHEL 6, and then Red Hat is compelled by the GPL to distribute all of their patches to that "customer". Seems like more of a PR gaffe to me, than an effective countermeasure against the competition gaining access to their code.

anonymous246 16y ago
Redhat is not obligated to take on anybody and everybody as a customer.
wmf 16y ago
I think this was discussed on LWN; if you get the patches from Red Hat and redistribute them, Red Hat will cancel your service contract. So it could work, but only once.
- ebiester 16y ago
  one fake company after another. So long as it's still cheaper for Oracle to maintain the fake companies, they'll do it.
- originalgeek 16y ago
  Thanks, I don't keep up on LWN. It seems to me then, that Red Hat has created their own fork of the kernel. Am I overreacting?
  - wmf 16y ago
    That has been going on forever. I remember the days when Red Hat was shipping a "2.4" kernel that had all the features from 2.6 backported into it. They're still submitting the patches upstream, so if you want an "unobfuscated" kernel tree you can get it from Linus.
scott_s 16y ago
I think you're unclear on what is not being shared. From what I understand, old version of RHEL had a vanilla kernel, and then an RPM with RH patches to that kernel, as well as the documentation for those patches. New versions of RHEL will not have a vanilla kernel; it will only contain a kernel with their patches pre-applied. Documentation for those patches will only be available to subscribers. The code is not being treated as the commodity, but the documentation for that code.
- TheAmazingIdiot 16y ago
  So, corporations with deep pockets (read Oracle) can buy the subscription through a proxy and have full access to the individual patches and full documentation. The rest of us independent and poor hackers cannot afford it and we suffer. Yeah, good idea RedHat. And yes, I know the GPL does not compel them to be nice.
yuhong 16y ago
Yea, SAP bought TomorrowNow which did exactly this. Fortunately they did it against proprietary software so Oracle was able to sue.
koenigdavidmj 16y ago
I have heard but not validated that RH contracts have a clause that if you ask for the source, they give it to you and then promptly cut your support contract.
- maw 16y ago
  The source is available: see ftp.redhat.com:/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/6Server/en/os/SRPMS for instance. Maybe explicitly asking for the source is considered different somehow from just ftping it, but I doubt it very much.

TomasSedovic 16y ago

I'm posting this to add a continuation to the story about Red Hat having changed the way they release their RHEL 6 kernel: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2272535 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2272535 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283188 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283188 If anyone actually cares about this: disclaimer -- I work for Red Hat. Not on RHEL.

naner 16y ago

Here's the meat since 80% of the article is PR blabbering and we all already know who Red Hat is: When we released RHEL 6 approximately four months ago, we changed the release of the kernel package to have all our patches pre-applied. Why did we make this change? To speak bluntly, the competitive landscape has changed. Our competitors in the Enterprise Linux market have changed their commercial approach from building and competing on their own customized Linux distributions, to one where they directly approach our customers offering to support RHEL. Frankly, our response is to compete. Essential knowledge that our customers have relied on to support their RHEL environments will increasingly only be available under subscription. The itemization of kernel patches that correlate with articles in our knowledge base is no longer available to our competitors, but rather only to our customers who have recognized the value of RHEL and have thus indirectly funded Red Hat’s contributions to open source that will advance their business now and in the future. TL;DR: Competition is hard, especially when we are "open" and everyone else is not, so we adopted our competitors' tactics.

GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
I was reading that and at the pre-last paragraph just thought "has my brain just gotten hit in the balls?" "We're committed to open source ... open source makes the best code in the world ... were innovators in open source ... we just decided to give ourselves a competitive advantage" ... WTF!? Its like in one breath he snuck it in. Bullcrap.
- rufugee 16y ago
  How exactly is RedHat not showing a commitment to open source? Do they invest in open source? CHECK. Do they contribute to the adoption of open source? CHECK. Are they abiding by the open source licenses that govern the use of the open source on which they rely? CHECK. All they have done in this case is make a legal, wise, and likely necessary move to protect themselves. Nothing they have done damages the kernel or prevents you from getting it. Nothing they have done damages any other OS projects. Sounds like you've got a whole mouthful of sour grapes there...
  - 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

sgift 16y ago
Maybe, but if your competitors are dicks and you don't react you may find yourself on the path to Chapter 11.

marshray 16y ago

Props to Red Hat for not putting out a bunch of BS pretending like it's not really what it really is.

yuhong 16y ago
It is not enough to be PR 2.0 compliant, which requires ending of control over the message, but it does ensure that adoption is much easier.

flyt 16y ago

This PR statement unfortunately fails to address the knock-on effects to the CentOS project that this will have.

flink 16y ago
It was discussed in the CentOS forums, though: https://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=29147&start=280 https://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=... To quote the forum thread: The CentOS kernel is just a rebuild, so there is no problem there. In the case of the centosplus kernel, because it may add patches, some extra steps might be needed. But again, that is not a major issue. Disclosure: I do work for Red Hat, but not on RHEL. Just posting info I saw earlier.
bernardwilson 16y ago
Would it not be possible to compute what patches have been applied? I'd guess for many patches it'd be trivially easy to determine if they were in or out; for the rest a brute-force search could be done...
- burgerbrain 16y ago
  "for the rest a brute-force search could be done..." Huhwhat? Brute force: A + B + C = D, where D and A are known.
  - pyre 16y ago
    I'm assuming the parent was talking about publicly available patches, not internally developed Red Hat ones. In that case, you could determine B and C out of a list of possible values by brute-forcing.
  - bernardwilson 16y ago
    No, some of Bs will be known as they're public patches. the remaining aggregate of C would be 'redhat patch to 2.6.x-y'.
nas 16y ago

joe_the_user 16y ago

Red Hat:"Essential knowledge that our customers have relied on to support their RHEL environments will increasingly only be available under subscription." FSF: "the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its user" However necessary Red Hat might consider this move to be, it is just as clearly a move away from the spirit of the GPL however much it may conform to the letter of the GPL. At the same time, open source companies need to compete on some basis and hiding information seems to be one basis. Is there an alternative to this? (serious question)

mapleoin 16y ago
You have all of the freedom to change the code that you always had. The code is exactly the same, but instead of being released in small chunks, it's released in one big tarball. The commit splitting and commit messages could be considered documentation, they are not part of the code and not covered by any license.
dedward 16y ago
The "Spirit" of the GPL argument has never rung true with me. It's not about creating shared projects and having big hippie hacker sit-ins. It's about keeping CODE free. This is a perfectly legitimate move by Redhat. It's unfortunate that they felt they needed to do this, but they are under no obligation to provide source code to anyone other than those to whom they distribute, and the GPL certainly doesn't force them to support anyone at all - they want to support paying customers. It's not a move away from the spirit of the GPL in any way.

xilun0 16y ago

> Red Hat often talks about upstream first, the practice of openly developing kernel features and bug fixes as part of the most recent upstream kernel before we ship them in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We know the value of getting code open from day one, debating it in the public forum, and letting it mature through a cycle long before it reaches our customers’ data centers. As the kernel community is well aware, it is standard practice for Red Hat to submit fixes that we find in supporting our customers. [...] > Why did we make this change? To speak bluntly, the competitive landscape has changed. [...] > but rather only to our customers who have recognized the value of RHEL and have thus indirectly funded Red Hat’s contributions to open source that will advance their business now and in the future. Translation : RH believes in the shared source model as initiated by MS, and not in the free software model were knowledge is valuable and should not be hidden, and were new advanced are done on the shoulders on giants. From now on, I consider RH as a traitor for the free software community, and will handle it like that (unless they change their unacceptable behaviour)

sigzero 16y ago
You are a bad translator and your attitude is perplexing. RH is conforming 100% to the GPL.

sagarun 16y ago

There is nothing wrong in what Red Hat did. I heard that some customers indeed bought oracle's unbreakable Linux, but switched back to RHEL after experiencing oracle's crappy support. The wonderful thing about Free and open source software is support being not a monopoly. You don't have to depend on one person. Oracle's offering will make RHEL and its support team much better and competitive.

jwcacces 16y ago

And that's how you make yourself irrelevant....

dasht 16y ago

Sustaining an artificial scarcity of high quality integrated OS releases has been what RHAT has been about since the beginning. Why is this new move any surprise?

mapleoin 16y ago
I wonder which of Red Hat's actions make you think that they're trying to create an artificial scarcity. There are hundreds of other ditros. How does Red Hat keep them from creating a quality product?
- dasht 16y ago
  By not sharing software work that is easily shared. They love to draw from upstream but they share only those parts of their infrastructure that don't threaten scarcity.
  - pyre 16y ago
    Why not list actual complaints? So far you've just been making generalizations. What software are they not sharing? Are they violating the GPL?

asdfor 16y ago

TL;DR: We found a loophole on the license, we are going to abuse it , Problem ??? :trollface:

Getahobby 16y ago

Hmm, sounds like Redhat is really looking for a BSD type license.

aphexairlines 16y ago

Here's why Red Hat has to do this: http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto041820061306424713 http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto041820061... Financial Times: Is open source going to be disruptive to Oracle? Larry Ellison: No. If an open source product gets good enough, we'll simply take it. Take [the web server software] Apache: once Apache got better than our own web server, we threw it away and took Apache. So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it – a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that's what we'll do.

rfugger 16y ago
And as open source slowly eats into their proprietary products, they have less and less to differentiate themselves from any other software company, and it becomes harder to lock customers in to their platform.
- pyre 16y ago
  Oracle will have plenty to differentiate themselves from 'any other software company.' Even if all they are offering is support, they are a trusted brand name among middle-management.

simplon 16y ago

The site seems to be down..

chris_j 16y ago

Anyone else see this? "redhat.com is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later." I was starting to wonder if the controversy surrounding this had taken their site down but the article is still there, a few screens down.