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.<br>
<br>Oracle's recent actions with regard to OpenOffice seem to demonstrate that they are not interested in collaborating with free software communities.<br><br>Here's the part of the article from Red Hat that I found relevant:<br>
<br>"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.
<p>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.</p>
<p>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."</p><p>Here's the link to the full press release: <br></p><p><a href="http://press.redhat.com/2011/03/04/commitment-to-open/">http://press.redhat.com/2011/03/04/commitment-to-open/</a><br>
</p>What do you think?<br><br>Jack Marxer<br><br>