Red Hat Stops Shipping Kernel Changes as Patches

mvar writes to point out a report from h-online about the Red Hat kernel source controversy. From the article: "Red Hat has changed the way it ships the source code for the Linux kernel. Previously, it was released as a standard kernel with a collection of patches which could be applied to create the source code of the kernel Red Hat used. Now though, the company ships a tarball of the source code with the patches already applied. This change, noted by Maxillian Attems and LWN.net, appears to be aimed at Oracle, who like others, repackage Red Hat's source as the basis for its Unbreakable Linux. Although targeted at Oracle, the changes will make work harder for distributions such as CentOS."

Comments

Re:Smart move by Red Hat

[Desler]

Red Hat is doing more heavy lifting than anyone else, but organizations like Oracle and CentOS are leeching off of Red Hat's hard work.

Boohoo? If you don't want people to leech your work then why would you release it under a license that specifically allows that?

They are absolutely meeting the requirements of the GPL.

And so are the people you claim are "leeching" off of Red Hat.

If these other organizations like Oracle and CentOS were saying "we're going to fork what Red Hat has done and come up with something different because we think we can do it better," like Mandrake did, that would be one thing. But Oracle and CentOS both pretty much have the same message: "we're going to take all the hard work that Red Hat has paid for, claim that ours is just like theirs, but make sure that Red Hat doesn't get paid for it."

But if they aren't violating the GPL, so what? You've basically constructed a double standard where it's okay for one party to use GPLed code however they want within the bounds of the license but yet you come back and whine about others who are doing the exact same thing. Once again, if you don't want people to use your code this way, why would you release it under a license that was specifically worded in order to allow this?

Re:I don't see the problem

[Improv]

Redhat repackages projects from all over the community to make its OS, adding in their own contributions and doing QA. It's not entirely theirs. They know that lone geeks and smaller shops are not their revenue source; they'll get most of their funds from larger businesses that in another world would be Solaris or HP-UX users.

It's not a "cheap knockoff" or "hacked" when all that's changed is to swap out some logos and stuff. Redhat's efforts only work because they coexist with the community that writes the software. If this is "slowly killing the company", it's been dying from its birth. It has survived so far in this environment, in symbiosis with everyone else. Sure, it's different than how things work in other parts of the industry, but that doesn't make it broken.

Linux companies are not a baseball team, and they're not individually meant to grow into huge empires. They're based, in the end, on broad efforts of the community. When they can make a moderate profit and push Linux, great! However, it's in our interest that should they ever misbehave, they can be shunned and will feel pain or die. They should be wearing our leash, not the other way around. If you like wearing the leash of some commercial software company, go for it.