On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 9:22 PM, Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> wrote:

hi patrick,

I think you may have misread the article it's not about selling software, but about withholding updates on bugs .. i.e. some info is no longer shared with competitors ...

As a software engineer myself, I know almost every update contains bug fixes. Maybe you are saying it becomes a "social imperative" when the changes are more 'vital'? I guess I can see the concern. It would be as though I had discovered a way to fix a terrible problem in the world such as disease or hunger, but am holding that solution ransom - revealing it only to those who pay me - similar to how the pharmaceutical and agriculture industries patent lifeforms to stop those designs from being copied. There is a difference however. The Linux kernel is protected by the GNU GPL which requires RedHat allow anyone who receives a copy of those fixes be allowed to further distribute them without limit. Hmm... So their actions require someone on earth buy at least 1 copy of those fixes, but cannot stop that buyer from giving those changes away - though there are real costs involved for internet connectivity that distributor must find some way to recover.

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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Jack Marxer wrote:

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

Thanks for clarifying that. I wonder if Oracle could easily circumvent this tactic by simply becoming a customer themselves. If RedHat won't accept them as a customer, they could pay one of their employees to buy an account to mask the connection. But then I guess RedHat will restrict redistribution of that information, and so Oracle will need to rewrite it "in their own words" to avoid plagiarism. Jonathan Corbet wrote:

The itemization of kernel patches that correlate with articles in our knowledge base is no longer available to our competitors

This makes me very interested in Copyright license RedHat will choose for that data.

Cooperation is a winning strategy in tit-for-tat when a player can't defect (or where it is too costly to defect). I think this situation, having to do with paid support on top of an open-source product is more complicated. (This reminds me of a time when third-party service of copiers was prevented, and there were moves to make it difficult for there to be third-party suppliers of consumables like inks, toners, and even paper too.) There is a nuance here that I don't understand. Namely, what is the value-added of the RHEL subscription, and in what way does Oracle compete by offering its own support subscription? Apart from price competition (there always being pressures to turn support and service into commodities), what is it that provides a meaningful differentiator for subscribers? Also, how does either party achieve market segregation (to prevent churning of subscribers and the inevitable commoditization) unless they are effectively forking the "RHEL" In some way that will ultimately fracture the commons around the (Red Hat) Linux distribution. I also wonder if the way MySQL is supported and licensed and the privileged position Oracle has in that regard is the lever that Red Hat can't defend against. In that case, the hiding of the way that updates to RHEL support subscribers reflect resolved bugs, defect repairs, and improvements seems to be self-defeating. Basically, I don't think we have the full story. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Samuel Rose Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 07:03 To: P2P Foundation mailing list Subject: Re: [P2P-F] red hat's restriction's On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 8:56 AM, Jack Marxer <[email protected]> wrote:

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.

What do you think?

I think that even though these companies maintain their respective attitudes/cultures with regards to F/LOSS communities, that they are going against the grain of the "game" they are in. In complex systems science terms: There is only one known winning scenario to the "tragedy of the commons", and it is when agents in the system "recognize" the "game" they are playing. If agents can understand that survival, or "winning" means cooperative governance of a finite resource, they operate in a way that does not over-use the resource, and all of their participation may be dynamically sustained over time. If they compete to over-use the system, eventually most or even up to all will die. The problem with the game as it is being played now by Redhat and Oracle is that it is a "tit for tat" game in the "commons". One move to hoard resources and keep them from competitors will likely spark a series of counter moves by competitors to hoard what has not yet been hoarded (if not right away, then eventually). The "players" come to believe they are in a "tit for tat" game. This is not just Red Hat's fault here. Oracle made the first moves, at least in the eyes of Red Hat, and Red Hat says as much in their press release (without naming names). The irony is that *even* in a "tit for tat" game, cooperation is the winning strategy.

Jack Marxer

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I don't disagree that the companies are playing the wrong game. I have no issue with that observation at all. My comment about the prisoner's dilemma and tit-for-tat (the full context of where cooperation is a winning strategy) is independent of the rest of my remarks, which are based on the public statements that this thread has been based on. I was not responding to anything specific in Sam's analysis. On reflection, I am not clear in what way the moves by Oracle and Red Hat constitute a game of tit-for-tat. This is not like suspension of nuclear-weapons testing or deployment of ICBMs. What is the 'this' in "I'll stop/start this and continue so long as you stop/start this too?" Is there even an implicit offer? Is there even a status quo ante that has any mutually-beneficial value for the commercial adversaries to return to? - - - - - - - Here's more of how I am baffled apart from the tit-for-tat aspect. Since the source code is always disclosed and freely-available for a legitimate GPL distribution, anyone can find out what was changed, even if they may not know why. (I presume that obscuring reasons in the source code is a self-defeating move.) So, while there may be a short-term advantage in obscurity, at some point it all nets out. While there may be some advantage in obtaining fixes from one source or another, or providing fixes better than a competitor, even though there is no obligation to directly contribute them back to any sort of community code base, they become visible and reusable and at some point it all nets out. I still don't believe that we have the full picture and it seems to me that the parties are dissembling about what is going on. While Red Hat may have simply never considered that a competitor would enter, I don't see how anyone can expect there to be a barrier to entry and to eventual commoditization of commercial support services for significant open-source distributions. It seems to me that beyond the convenience and economy, the benefit of these support subscriptions is also related to some sort of risk mitigation for the subscribers. Is some of it effectively a premium around the safety of relying on the RHEL distribution? Is there some aspect of indemnification incorporated in the support assurance? - Dennis PS: The Oracle OpenOffice maneuver is more complicated. Oracle has all rights over their use of the OpenOffice.org distribution by virtue of the contributor agreements they (and Sun) obtained. This means Oracle can dual-(or multi-) license OpenOffice.org code and they can also incorporate proprietary components that are not included in the open-source version and make completely-proprietary distributions, for that matter. In short, they (and any private licensees) are not themselves limited by the LGPL license under which OpenOffice.org is offered. There were always support subscriptions from Sun, for its proprietary Star Office variant, and now for Oracle OpenOffice. We'll see how that goes and, indeed, whether there is an indemnification factor. Here the competitive entry is an open-source pure-play (Libre Office and The Document Foundation) that can use any of the OpenOffice.org open-source-licensed code and develop it further independent of Oracle (and any private licensees), evidently without consequence. My view of this asymmetrical situation is that the open-source contributor community has defected to an equal-footing arrangement where support and ongoing development is a shared, mutual effort, effectively isolating the Oracle-constrained OpenOffice.org. It's as if the commons was moved, with OpenOffice.org left in the corral. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next two years. -----Original Message----- From: Samuel Rose [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 08:37 To: [email protected]; P2P Foundation mailing list Subject: Re: [P2P-F] red hat's restriction's On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 11:11 AM, Dennis E. Hamilton <[email protected]> wrote:

Cooperation is a winning strategy in tit-for-tat when a player can't defect (or where it is too costly to defect).

I think this situation, having to do with paid support on top of an open-source product is more complicated. (This reminds me of a time when third-party service of copiers was prevented, and there were moves to make it difficult for there to be third-party suppliers of consumables like inks, toners, and even paper too.)

I think you are focusing in only on part of what I actually said, but that's ok because I am pretty confident most others here will get what my actual argument was as I wrote it (that these companies are playing the WRONG GAME)

There is a nuance here that I don't understand. Namely, what is the value-added of the RHEL subscription, and in what way does Oracle compete by offering its own support subscription?

It is simple, Red Hat releases the source code and patches all in one shot, and doesn't tell anyone who doesn't pay them WHY they did it. This is a move to prevent Oracle and other competitors from offering support for RHEL brand Linux (in addition to their rebadged Linux) enabled by the free info that RH shares when they release patches. This is a tit for tat move in a commons environment

Apart from price competition (there always being pressures to turn support and service into commodities), what is it that provides a meaningful differentiator for subscribers?

See above

Also, how does either party achieve market segregation (to prevent churning of subscribers and the inevitable commoditization) unless they are effectively forking the "RHEL" In some way that will ultimately fracture the commons around the (Red Hat) Linux distribution.

I also wonder if the way MySQL is supported and licensed and the privileged position Oracle has in that regard is the lever that Red Hat can't defend against. In that case, the hiding of the way that updates to RHEL support subscribers reflect resolved bugs, defect repairs, and improvements seems to be self-defeating.

Basically, I don't think we have the full story.

It turns out that I do.

- Dennis

-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Samuel Rose Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 07:03 To: P2P Foundation mailing list Subject: Re: [P2P-F] red hat's restriction's

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 8:56 AM, Jack Marxer <[email protected]> wrote:

...

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.

What do you think?

I think that even though these companies maintain their respective attitudes/cultures with regards to F/LOSS communities, that they are going against the grain of the "game" they are in.

In complex systems science terms: There is only one known winning scenario to the "tragedy of the commons", and it is when agents in the system "recognize" the "game" they are playing. If agents can understand that survival, or "winning" means cooperative governance of a finite resource, they operate in a way that does not over-use the resource, and all of their participation may be dynamically sustained over time. If they compete to over-use the system, eventually most or even up to all will die.

The problem with the game as it is being played now by Redhat and Oracle is that it is a "tit for tat" game in the "commons". One move to hoard resources and keep them from competitors will likely spark a series of counter moves by competitors to hoard what has not yet been hoarded (if not right away, then eventually). The "players" come to believe they are in a "tit for tat" game. This is not just Red Hat's fault here. Oracle made the first moves, at least in the eyes of Red Hat, and Red Hat says as much in their press release (without naming names). The irony is that *even* in a "tit for tat" game, cooperation is the winning strategy.

...

Jack Marxer

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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

Interesting. In some sort of pure tit-for-tat, Red Hat would have offered to support Oracle's distribution (though it would have to be credible) or encroached on an area of Oracle business that it considered vulnerable to their competitive entry. Of course, under competition law, it gets dicey how they can disengage either way. I'm not sure how the move-countermove in the case at hand actually works as a tit-for-tat. I think this is more like Chess or Go than a tit-for-tat situation. Red Hat's move strikes me as defensive more than counter-aggressive and I see no incentive for Oracle to stop pursuing support agreements for RHEL. If Oracle starts losing RHEL support customers, it would be interesting to see what their move is then. But if Oracle were to cease entering into new RHEL support agreements and not renew any, that's a big sacrifice just to have Red Hat go back to their previous way of identifying issues and their remedies via updates. It's difficult for me to foresee that the Red Hat counter-move is going to be very effective. I'd be surprised if Oracle blinked. Let's wait and see. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Samuel Rose [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 16:08 To: [email protected] Cc: P2P Foundation mailing list Subject: Re: [P2P-F] red hat's restriction's On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 2:28 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton <[email protected]> wrote:

I don't disagree that the companies are playing the wrong game. I have no issue with that observation at all.

What are the "games" that you see are being played (or perceived by the players) here if not "Tit for Tat"?

My comment about the prisoner's dilemma and tit-for-tat (the full context of where cooperation is a winning strategy) is independent of the rest of my remarks, which are based on the public statements that this thread has been based on.

I was not responding to anything specific in Sam's analysis.

On reflection, I am not clear in what way the moves by Oracle and Red Hat constitute a game of tit-for-tat. This is not like suspension of nuclear-weapons testing or deployment of ICBMs. What is the 'this' in "I'll stop/start this and continue so long as you stop/start this too?" Is there even an implicit offer? Is there even a status quo ante that has any mutually-beneficial value for the commercial adversaries to return to?

There are many documented uses (including animal behavior sciences, and social sciences ref P. Kollock) of the application of "Tit for Tat" strategy beyond the classic nuclear war outcomes. MOVE = Oracle (and other Red Hat competitors) to RHEL customers "We can offer you support on the RHEL brand of Linux" <- Why do the Red Hat competitors do it? It is my guess that they are focused on profit to shareholders first and foremost. Thus they are in a COMPETITION for market share, and this explains why they would start to claim they can support RHEL in addition to their own in house Linux brand. COUNTER MOVE = Red Hat "We will no longer give away the reason why we have created updates and patches. We will simply give away patches, and leave it to our competitors to decipher why we made the patch instead of sharing that information. This will prevent our competitors from free riding on our work" [ ... ] Oracle makes a move to create a zero-sum outcome where Red Hat loses and Oracle gains (Oracle 1, Red Hat 0) Red Hat responds by removing access to the information that Oracle could use to get the perceived advantage (either both 0 or both .5 depending on how you look at it). [ ... ]

[Used wrong sender. This should get to the list better]: Oops, I forgot the link. I am basing my general sense of tit-for-tat on this account: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat>. In those terms, I don't see the "equivalent retaliation" in Red Hat's move. -----Original Message----- From: Dennis E. Hamilton [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 16:52 To: 'Samuel Rose' Cc: 'P2P Foundation mailing list' Subject: RE: [P2P-F] red hat's restriction's Interesting. In some sort of pure tit-for-tat, Red Hat would have offered to support Oracle's distribution (though it would have to be credible) or encroached on an area of Oracle business that it considered vulnerable to their competitive entry. Of course, under competition law, it gets dicey how they can disengage either way. I'm not sure how the move-countermove in the case at hand actually works as a tit-for-tat. I think this is more like Chess or Go than a tit-for-tat situation. Red Hat's move strikes me as defensive more than counter-aggressive and I see no incentive for Oracle to stop pursuing support agreements for RHEL. If Oracle starts losing RHEL support customers, it would be interesting to see what their move is then. But if Oracle were to cease entering into new RHEL support agreements and not renew any, that's a big sacrifice just to have Red Hat go back to their previous way of identifying issues and their remedies via updates. It's difficult for me to foresee that the Red Hat counter-move is going to be very effective. I'd be surprised if Oracle blinked. Let's wait and see. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Samuel Rose [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2011 16:08 To: [email protected] Cc: P2P Foundation mailing list Subject: Re: [P2P-F] red hat's restriction's On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 2:28 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton <[email protected]> wrote:

I don't disagree that the companies are playing the wrong game. I have no issue with that observation at all.

What are the "games" that you see are being played (or perceived by the players) here if not "Tit for Tat"?

My comment about the prisoner's dilemma and tit-for-tat (the full context of where cooperation is a winning strategy) is independent of the rest of my remarks, which are based on the public statements that this thread has been based on.

I was not responding to anything specific in Sam's analysis.

On reflection, I am not clear in what way the moves by Oracle and Red Hat constitute a game of tit-for-tat. This is not like suspension of nuclear-weapons testing or deployment of ICBMs. What is the 'this' in "I'll stop/start this and continue so long as you stop/start this too?" Is there even an implicit offer? Is there even a status quo ante that has any mutually-beneficial value for the commercial adversaries to return to?

There are many documented uses (including animal behavior sciences, and social sciences ref P. Kollock) of the application of "Tit for Tat" strategy beyond the classic nuclear war outcomes. MOVE = Oracle (and other Red Hat competitors) to RHEL customers "We can offer you support on the RHEL brand of Linux" <- Why do the Red Hat competitors do it? It is my guess that they are focused on profit to shareholders first and foremost. Thus they are in a COMPETITION for market share, and this explains why they would start to claim they can support RHEL in addition to their own in house Linux brand. COUNTER MOVE = Red Hat "We will no longer give away the reason why we have created updates and patches. We will simply give away patches, and leave it to our competitors to decipher why we made the patch instead of sharing that information. This will prevent our competitors from free riding on our work" [ ... ] Oracle makes a move to create a zero-sum outcome where Red Hat loses and Oracle gains (Oracle 1, Red Hat 0) Red Hat responds by removing access to the information that Oracle could use to get the perceived advantage (either both 0 or both .5 depending on how you look at it). [ ... ]