As I understand what Red Hat is doing, they are not witholding bug fixes. Instead they are simply packaging multiple bug fixes together and offering that update to their customers (for money) and to anyone else who can get it from a customer (for free or otherwise). The difference in their current behavior, again as I understand it, is that they don't delineate to persons or companies who are not their clients exactly what bug fixes are included in the update. This makes it more difficult for Oracle to make money from Red Hat's efforts to improve the GPL-licensed software and is in complete accord with the GPL license terms. Oracle seems to be the party at fault here by trying to make money from the efforts of the community and Red Hat without contributing back. Oracle's recent actions with regard to OpenOffice seem to demonstrate that they are not interested in collaborating with free software communities. Here's the part of the article from Red Hat that I found relevant: "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. As an open source company, Red Hat is held to high standards. We embrace this. In 2011 you can expect us to increase our investment in open source contributions, while simultaneously competing with companies who are threatened by the continuing disruptive advancement of open source in the enterprise." Here's the link to the full press release: http://press.redhat.com/2011/03/04/commitment-to-open/ What do you think? Jack Marxer