On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 2:24 AM, Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> wrote:
thanks, could we call your suggestion a 'corporate commons' approach (non-pejoratively)
Perhaps. Publicly traded corporate participants in open source software commons have to give priority to shareholder's interests under US and possibly other country's laws. They have no legal obligation to sustaining commons other than complying with GPL v.x terms. It would be more difficult for a company such as Redhat to take a sharing approach that goes beyond the GPL and rectify it with shareholder interests than it would be for them to make decision that tries to protect "profitability". (The same goes for Oracle, IBM, etc). Still, all of that being said, a commitment to cooperation over competition could plausibly prove to be more profitable than a decision to enclose/obscure in a bid to "protect" in a competitive environment. The reality of course is that there are no guarantees that an enclosing "protectionist" move will increase profits more than a binding agreement with competitors to cooperate and share various resources. So, the suggestion still stands that sharing and cooperation are an overlooked option for companies of any type. It is likely culture and worldview that drive the decision making here. Businesses would do well to consider employing complex systems models in cases like this, plus be open to questioning long-held assumptions.
On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 12:12 PM, Samuel Rose <[email protected]> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 9:57 PM, Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> wrote:
http://press.redhat.com/2011/03/04/commitment-to-open/
I would welcome any comments on this for the p2p blog,
see:
Recently, Jonathan Corbet, respected kernel community member and editor at LWN, commented on our change in kernel RPM packaging. 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.
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It appears to be a reaction to Oracle. Red Hat is trying to make Oracle work harder at "cherry picking" kernel updates to http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/linux/index.html which is a re-packaged RHEL.
Not only that, but as the press release says, companies like Oracle are apparently offering to support RHEL itself. So obscuring the reason for updates makes it harder for a company to say that they will support a competitor's product.
As crazy as it may sound, Red Hat could do *better* to figure out a way to create a long term cooperation agreement with companies like Oracle, F5 Networks, and others who repackage RHEL. What could these companies share back with Red Hat that takes money/profit out of the picture?
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-- -- Sam Rose Future Forward Institute and Forward Foundation Tel:+1(517) 639-1552 Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451 skype: samuelrose email: [email protected] http://forwardfound.org http://futureforwardinstitute.org http://hollymeadcapital.com http://p2pfoundation.net http://socialmediaclassroom.com "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." - Carl Sagan