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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 cha

by 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...
  - lukeschlather 16y ago
    They're withholding documentation for "open source" code they wrote. You're welcome to argue that's okay, sound business, etc. but if they were committed to open source they would release documentation alongside their code. And until recently, they did.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      They are withholding the intermediate steps between their kernel and a vanilla one. They are not withholding the source code - you can study it, change it and even diff it against the vanilla kernel to see what they changed. I bet some comments may even help you figure out why they made a specific change. Unfortunately, I believe all Oracle will just pay some proxy for RH support and get the same individual patches.
    - rufugee 16y ago
      It sounds like the problem you both have is a high sense of entitlement for something that the license doesn't entitle you to have...why is Red Hat at fault for asking you to pay for something that wasn't at all free or easy to create?
      - lukeschlather 16y ago
        Where did I say they were at fault? All I said was that they're making a significant move away from their open source business model. Now in your post that I was replying to, on the other hand, you clearly seem to be talking about the broader social contract that the open source community is organized around. Red Hat makes the best code and documentation they have available to anyone, and in return the community does the same. Red Hat has loudly trumpeted the superiority of this social contract over the proprietary avenue. Now their documentation has become proprietary. That says to me they believe the social contract and the business model they've built around it are somehow flawed. Personally, I don't have a dog in this fight, and so I don't feel at all entitled to their documentation. If I'm working with Red Hat I'll be working with someone who has a support contract. But if I were, for example, someone involved with Fedora who had worked on resolving issues in Red Hat, I would feel like Red Hat was acting improperly, regardless of legality. Are you arguing that it's okay to free ride on the work of the community and not give back what you create? Stop muddying the waters by flitting back and forth between morality and legality, please.
burgerbrain 16y ago
"we adopted our competitors' tactics." No, Red Hat develops software, Oracle mooches off Red Hat's work. They have made this change to ensure that they can stay in business, which is important because unlike Oracle, they actually do work on the software they ship. They can't adopt Oracle's tactics because there is nobody else doing what Red Hat does.
- mapleoin 16y ago
  They can't adopt Oracle's tactics because there is nobody else doing what Red Hat does. SUSE does what Red Hat does (work on the software it ships). In addition to that it also provides Enterprise Support for RHEL :). Which might make it both good and evil you could say or maybe just chameleonic.
  - burgerbrain 16y ago
    Not to anywhere even close to approaching Red Hat's extend, and RHEL certainly isn't just repackaging SLES so my point remains.
    - GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
      It is true, however this is a bullshit example of loopholes of open source software. However to RH's defense I do see why they would do this. However part 2: RH is still mooching off the open source work of worldwide contributors. They need to respect that.
    - munchhausen 16y ago
      > Not to anywhere even close to approaching Red Hat's extend This needs a citation. I for one do not agree with you. Looking at the statistics of top kernel contributors for kernel 2.6.35 by lines changed¹, Red Hat can claim 7.8% of lines changed while Novell (SuSE) is at 4.7%. The difference is considerable but I do not think it's fair to say that that it's "Not to anywhere even close to approaching Red Hat's extend[sic]". These statistics obviously cover just the kernel. The Linux environment is much larger than that, and it should be pointed out that SuSE is _the_ major contributor to KDE with openSUSE being generally regarded as the top-of-the-line KDE distribution. Novell also contributes significantly to GNOME. I do not want to turn this comment into a laundry list of SuSE contributions to Linux, so I'll just say that IMO SuSE are certainly holding their own as the 2nd largest enterprise Linux vendor in terms of contribution to the general Linux ecosystem. If you do not agree, I would appreciate it if you could back your opinion with substantial evidence as opposed to just making unsubstantiated claims. ¹ http://lwn.net/Articles/395961/ http://lwn.net/Articles/395961/
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
w1ntermute 16y ago
Isn't this kind of pointless though? On a previous HN post about this, someone said that you could just use diff to extract the changes. It won't be long before someone creates a site with the patches that Red Hat should have provided.
- nwmcsween 16y ago
  That would make "clean" patches, meaning you get no real history of why things changed, which is important in understanding a large project like Linux.
Duff 16y ago
You need to change to adapt to things. Do you do things exactly the same as you did in high school? Probably not -- you adapted to the changes that life threw at you. RH is a small company that has to compete against behemoths with a full portfolio of software. While doing that, they make meaningful contributions that benefit all. A company like Oracle buries the cost of their RHEL clone in a larger purchase, or wedges it into an ELA. Why is it so unreasonable for Red Hat to force Oracle to do their own homework, especially where the bleeding edge development work is all openly available via Fedora.

by naner 16y ago

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...
- lukeschlather 16y ago
  They're withholding documentation for "open source" code they wrote. You're welcome to argue that's okay, sound business, etc. but if they were committed to open source they would release documentation alongside their code. And until recently, they did.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    They are withholding the intermediate steps between their kernel and a vanilla one. They are not withholding the source code - you can study it, change it and even diff it against the vanilla kernel to see what they changed. I bet some comments may even help you figure out why they made a specific change. Unfortunately, I believe all Oracle will just pay some proxy for RH support and get the same individual patches.
  - rufugee 16y ago
    It sounds like the problem you both have is a high sense of entitlement for something that the license doesn't entitle you to have...why is Red Hat at fault for asking you to pay for something that wasn't at all free or easy to create?
    - lukeschlather 16y ago
      Where did I say they were at fault? All I said was that they're making a significant move away from their open source business model. Now in your post that I was replying to, on the other hand, you clearly seem to be talking about the broader social contract that the open source community is organized around. Red Hat makes the best code and documentation they have available to anyone, and in return the community does the same. Red Hat has loudly trumpeted the superiority of this social contract over the proprietary avenue. Now their documentation has become proprietary. That says to me they believe the social contract and the business model they've built around it are somehow flawed. Personally, I don't have a dog in this fight, and so I don't feel at all entitled to their documentation. If I'm working with Red Hat I'll be working with someone who has a support contract. But if I were, for example, someone involved with Fedora who had worked on resolving issues in Red Hat, I would feel like Red Hat was acting improperly, regardless of legality. Are you arguing that it's okay to free ride on the work of the community and not give back what you create? Stop muddying the waters by flitting back and forth between morality and legality, please.

burgerbrain 16y ago

"we adopted our competitors' tactics." No, Red Hat develops software, Oracle mooches off Red Hat's work. They have made this change to ensure that they can stay in business, which is important because unlike Oracle, they actually do work on the software they ship. They can't adopt Oracle's tactics because there is nobody else doing what Red Hat does.

mapleoin 16y ago
They can't adopt Oracle's tactics because there is nobody else doing what Red Hat does. SUSE does what Red Hat does (work on the software it ships). In addition to that it also provides Enterprise Support for RHEL :). Which might make it both good and evil you could say or maybe just chameleonic.
- burgerbrain 16y ago
  Not to anywhere even close to approaching Red Hat's extend, and RHEL certainly isn't just repackaging SLES so my point remains.
  - GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
    It is true, however this is a bullshit example of loopholes of open source software. However to RH's defense I do see why they would do this. However part 2: RH is still mooching off the open source work of worldwide contributors. They need to respect that.
  - munchhausen 16y ago
    > Not to anywhere even close to approaching Red Hat's extend This needs a citation. I for one do not agree with you. Looking at the statistics of top kernel contributors for kernel 2.6.35 by lines changed¹, Red Hat can claim 7.8% of lines changed while Novell (SuSE) is at 4.7%. The difference is considerable but I do not think it's fair to say that that it's "Not to anywhere even close to approaching Red Hat's extend[sic]". These statistics obviously cover just the kernel. The Linux environment is much larger than that, and it should be pointed out that SuSE is _the_ major contributor to KDE with openSUSE being generally regarded as the top-of-the-line KDE distribution. Novell also contributes significantly to GNOME. I do not want to turn this comment into a laundry list of SuSE contributions to Linux, so I'll just say that IMO SuSE are certainly holding their own as the 2nd largest enterprise Linux vendor in terms of contribution to the general Linux ecosystem. If you do not agree, I would appreciate it if you could back your opinion with substantial evidence as opposed to just making unsubstantiated claims. ¹ http://lwn.net/Articles/395961/ http://lwn.net/Articles/395961/

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

w1ntermute 16y ago

Isn't this kind of pointless though? On a previous HN post about this, someone said that you could just use diff to extract the changes. It won't be long before someone creates a site with the patches that Red Hat should have provided.

nwmcsween 16y ago
That would make "clean" patches, meaning you get no real history of why things changed, which is important in understanding a large project like Linux.

Duff 16y ago

You need to change to adapt to things. Do you do things exactly the same as you did in high school? Probably not -- you adapted to the changes that life threw at you. RH is a small company that has to compete against behemoths with a full portfolio of software. While doing that, they make meaningful contributions that benefit all. A company like Oracle buries the cost of their RHEL clone in a larger purchase, or wedges it into an ELA. Why is it so unreasonable for Red Hat to force Oracle to do their own homework, especially where the bleeding edge development work is all openly available via Fedora.