[P2P-F] red hat's restriction's

Wed Mar 9 14:56:15 CET 2011

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
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