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

Thu Mar 10 01:08:26 CET 2011

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 2:28 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton
<dennis.hamilton at acm.org> 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"

A quote from Red Hat's press release:

http://press.redhat.com/2011/03/04/commitment-to-open/

"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."

There it is.

"Frankly, our response is to compete"

Their reponse to what?

"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."

They lay it all out for you right in their press release.

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).

>  - - - - - - -
> 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 can agree with you here. These companies are driven legally to try
and maximize profit for shareholders, so they have to constantly show
growth on the accounting books whenever possible. This episode from
Red Hat is illustrative of a case where the companies are failing to
explore how commons-based resources, cooperation, and sharing might
actually make a better case for sustainable growth and profits than
always moving to enclose/hoard/protect "assets". The *culture* of
business tends to disregard that alternatives to

> 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.
>

Red Hat has many competitors, but none that recently went directly for
the core of their bottom line that I am aware of (until now). In the
past, most competitors copied and re-badged the whole OS. Red Hat
makes it clear that they couldn't handle the same companies also
offering to support Red Hat's own product.

> 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?
>

The story around the core issue discussed in this thread is definitely
about the move, counter move competition. Red Hat CTO, VP Worldwide
Engineering Brian Stevens makes this clear.

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