Red Hat turns on Oracle and other Red Hat Linux clone-makers

[Basil Chupin]

Red Hat <http://www.redhat.com> has decided it's no going to be Mr. Nice 
Linux anymore for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 
<http://www.redhat.com/rhel> clone makers such as Oracle 
<http://www.oracle.com> and CentOS <http://www.centos.org>. Sure, in 
open-source, you share the code. That's rule one. But, that doesn't mean 
you need to make it /easy/ for your rivals.

What Red Hat has done, for the last several months, is release its 
version of the Linux kernel with all its own patches incorporated into 
the RHEL code. Before that, pre-RHEL6, which was released in November 
2010 
<http://practical-tech.com/infrastructure/red-hat-announces-red-hat-enterprise-linux-6/3249>, 
Red Hat released the vanilla Linux code with its improvements and fixes 
in separate patches. This method made it very easy for an Oracle or 
another Linux distributor to see exactly what Red Had had done and thus 
made it easy for them to pick and choose which patches they'd adopt. 
Now, it's much harder both to do this and to copycat RHEL.

As Joe Brockmeier aptly put it, "It's sort of like asking someone for a 
recipe for the family's chocolate chip cookies, and getting cookie 
batter instead. <http://www.linux-mag.com/id/8414>" Sure you can tease 
out what the ingredients are, but it's not easy.

[More]

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/red-hat-turns-on-oracle-and-other-red-hat-linux-clone-makers/8485

-- 
"Aaah....another pointless day when I've achieved nothing."
                   Bender, Futurama.

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