Here's the meat since 80% of the article is PR blabbering and we all already know who Red Hat is:<p><i>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.<p>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.</i><p>TL;DR: Competition is hard, especially when we are "open" and everyone else is not, so we adopted our competitors' tactics.
I'm posting this to add a continuation to the story about Red Hat having changed the way they release their RHEL 6 kernel:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2272535" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2272535</a><p>and<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283188" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283188</a><p><i>If anyone actually cares about this: disclaimer -- I work for Red Hat. Not on RHEL.</i>
Here's why Red Hat has to do this:<p><a href="http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto041820061306424713" rel="nofollow">http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto041820061...</a><p>Financial Times: Is open source going to be disruptive to Oracle?<p>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.
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.
There is nothing wrong in what Red Hat did. I <i>heard</i> that some customers indeed bought oracle's unbreakable Linux, but switched back to RHEL after experiencing oracle's crappy support.<p>The wonderful thing about Free and open source software is <i>support</i> 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.
Red Hat:"Essential knowledge that our customers have relied on to support their RHEL environments <i>will increasingly only be available under subscription.</i>"<p>FSF: "the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and <i>change</i> all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for <i>all its user</i>"<p>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.<p>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)
Anyone else see this?<p>"redhat.com is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later."<p>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.
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?
> 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.<p>[...]<p>> Why did we make this change? To speak bluntly, the competitive landscape has changed.<p>[...]<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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)