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Red Hat Nears $1 Billion In Revenues, Closing Door On Clones
darthcamaro writes "Red Hat is almost at its goal of being the first pure-play open source vendor to hit $1 billion in Revenues. Red Hat reported its fiscal 2011 revenues this week which hit $909 million. Going forward, Red Hat has already taken steps to protect its business by changing the way it packages the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 kernel, making it harder for Oracle to clone. 'We are the top commercial contributor to most of the components of the Linux kernel and we think we have a lot of value and we want to make sure that, that value is recognized,' Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said. 'In terms of competition, I don't think we necessarily saw anything different from before but I'd say better to close the barn door before the horses leave than afterwards.'"
CentOS and Scientific Linux are still workable, it's the "enhanced clones" like Oracle and Novell that are cherrypicking RHEL's best customers and not giving back to the open source community with development in open source filesystems, X, authentication, and genuine hardware support that are messing up the business.
It's just too bad CentOS has lost its way with one of its developers, Johnny Hughes, telling people to not let the door hit them in the ass on the way out if they don't like how late everything is and then ignoring attempts to help. I just switched to Scientific Linux and and am quite happy.
Will I still be able to get the clone in the form of CentOS? I use CentOS a lot in our development environment and less critical infrastructure, just to make sure that I'll be able to upgrade it to RHEL if the system requires more professional support.
CentOS is fine, because they're a 100% clone of Red Hat. Red Hat is putting their kernel patches together instead of separate. If you wanted to pick and choose which ones you used and make something different, it would be *slightly* more difficult. But considerate the last release was broken out. You know what they were starting with. Take a diff of the new patchset against the old one, and you should have an idea of what they've changed or added.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Goatse, again.
Man, you are hilarious. No one in history has ever done that before. And you've created a couple accounts today just for that. When you look back on your life, I'm sure you'll feel content and fulfilled.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
...is it bad that seeing a goatse makes me wax nostalgic?
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
Had you clicked on the link, you would know the GP is a troll who has been posting goatse links on throwaway accounts.
UID over 2 million + link to blog.com = troll.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
I rest my case.
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
TFA doesn't specify what this actually means, so let me speculate. They're not going to go closed-source; they'd be lynched. I think this is a reference to the fact that they're distributing their source prepatched now, to make it harder to just take their patches and apply them to other distros.
IMO that's kind of sleazy. They got where they are standing on the shoulders of giants. The deal was: here, have this free stuff, build on it, make money with it, but you have to keep giving back. And they got their value out of it, but now they're trying to give back only the minimum they're contractually obligated to do. It's legal and not purely evil, but still moderately scummy.
I don't really see it being that good for them, either. Oracle isn't going to have much trouble reverse-engineering the patches back out, but RedHat now ends up in a more difficult position: fewer of their patches will be incorporated upstream, so they have to spend more work porting them into each new release; they'll have less community review and bugfixes in their patches; and they're going to alienate the community.
On the other hand RH users won't end up in the worst scenario: stuck using RH's buggy crap and unable to do anything about it. The source will still be there; they can still dive in to figure out what's wrong and fix it instead of dealing with a black box. I know I had to more than a few times when supporting RHEL systems.
Yep you heard it right. CentOS followers: Just switch to Debian!
Someone educate me: Why are people incapable of running the diff command between Red Hat and the pure kernel sources in order to get just the patches?
I believe they have no beef against CentOS, actually I've seen at least one Red Hat employee encouraging the use of CentOS, since Red Had is the "de facto upgrade path" (not the exact words, but something along this way). So you freely enlarge the customer base, which will go to Red Hat when they need higher level commercial support. And for the free ones, even Microsoft has recognized they cannot sell to students, and are giving away the software anyways.
However Oracle is another deal. They just slap Oracle logo on Red Hat, do not acknowledge the source, and sell is as "unbreakable Linux". This would make a regular person ashamed of himself. They benefit a lot from open source but not giving back much in return. Do not start me with what they're doing to Solaris, Java, and OpenOffice...
So I'm with Red Hat on this one, at least until they do something directly bad to CentOS.
I'm confused. How on earth do you think Novell is cloning RHEL? They are a significant contributer to linux, 3rd from the top, and non-trivial user ecosystem (they supplied the devs who got alot of the new AMD graphics stuff going, as I recall.) Big contributers to KDE and libre office. If they contribute less then redhat, that would only be because they have less staff (I think... at least the suse part of them does, for sure).
Suse is as different from RHEL as debian is. Yes, they both use rpms. That's about it.
GOATSE LINK.
By the way kiddo, find something new to shock us with. Slashdotters are pretty much immune to that one.
!!!!!!!!!!!!Dont click that link!!!! It shows the anus of a guy or something. Mod it down!!!
Links to goatse, don't click
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
Okay, wait, goatse link threads are not something I would normally post in, but I have to ask.
By "or something" do you mean that you didn't look at it long enough to really be sure what it was (and I pray for your sake that this is the case), or are you just giving voice to that little, terrified piece in the back of your brain that insists that cannot be human?
The enemies of Democracy are
Why don't you last 3 linux users just swallow your pride and buy a mac like everyone else with more than 2 brain cells has done in the last few years?
I know you're just a troll but I can't resist. First of all, Linux and RHEL in particular, runs on actual servers. You know, those computers Apple slowly are phasing out? Xserve is gone, and Mac Pro server is soon to follow. And, Linux pisses on Mac OS X when it comes to market share on servers. Lastly, it's Mac users that are used to swallow other guys 'pride', so just stick to what you're best at: Sucking cock.
-- Linux user #369862
Scientific Linux 6 is already out. See http://ftp1.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6.0/x86_64/os/sl-release-notes-6.0.html for their detailed release notes. If there was any doubt in your mind that the direct rebuild projects are unaffected by this move, there shouldn't be any longer.
It's pretty clear they're trying very hard this time around to stay in lock-step with upstream (what they call TUV and what CentOS calls PNAELV) and add fewer packages into the mix directly. They're also funded to do this work full-time by the US government, and since many universities and national labs rely on SL, it's not going away any time soon.
If you've never tried it before, I encourage you to do so. To quote the old tagline, it's already ready already.
Michael Jennings | HPC Systems Engineer, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab | Author, Eterm (eterm.org)
If you want scummy, look to companies like Oracle which just take, repackage, and rarely give back. They're the real problem, not RedHat.
RedHat's patches still get submitted upstream for inclusion in the main kernel, which very often does happen.
I have no sympathy whatsoever for leeches that were taking RedHat patches and rolling their own distributions without contributing enough back on their own.
I fail to see how this affects seperate distros like Debian, which aren't based on RedHat-patched source in the first place.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
http://lwn.net/Articles/222773/. Red Hat plays very well with others. Part of the problem is the logistics, with Git and new Kernel development you're looking at literally thousands of source code patches (which would make for a completely unwieldy SPEC file) because Red Hat back ports stuff to keep a stable Kernel in the Enterprise Linux..
putting the centos stuff aside. Redhat are doing a great job and contributing great code to the open source community. They uphold open source ideals by keeping fedora free of closed source code. I have been using Redhat/Fedora for years through my undergraduate degree, PhD and now in my job want to say what a great big thanks to you guys and wish you the best for the future!
Take a look at Novell's "RHEL support" offering. It's turned out to be complete crap, repackaging RHEL packages and alleging to offer one-stop support for SuSE customers, and blaming any problems on RHEL to convince customers to switch to SuSE.
http://www.novell.com/promo/suse/free-30days-expanded-support.html
It's complete bait and switch.
oracle is funding btrfs development.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I'm really surprised that this comment was modded up. Oracle is responsible for btrfs (negating the "filesystems" argument), Novell was the catalyst for the modern linux composited desktop with compiz/Xgl (negating the X argument), and if I thought about it for more than 10 seconds, I'm sure I could come up with a shitload of other examples where these two companies that you've "cherrypicked" have been a driving force for good in the linux world. I do agree with your sentiment but, you sound bitter for these companies not having contributed to technologies that you don't realise you are using. But, most likely, the have. And in a big way. I'm all for hating companies like Oracle but, hate them for the right reasons.
If every distro is doing the same thing, this is not going to be very good for the future of Linux. Engineers at every distro are going to waste a lot time trying to figure what other distros had been patching, which part of the code had been changed while a specific issue was fixed, etc. Everyone is going to end up wasting a lot of time, and creating a lot of confusion.
Even though Linux distros are quite fragmented, but the current kernel development has been working quite well, because every distro is playing by the rule (more or less), which is quite transparent. Now, with this kind of one time big change by RH, even though you can still diff on all the source codes, it's not going to be easy to figure what has bee done (and why). And I think it's going to trigger other distros to behave similarly.
And it will be even harder for the users. As a user, if we have in-house-built applications that rely on specific version of a library or module, we might not want to have a giant patch on basically everything, we probably want only small, concise, specific patch for some critical security problems. I'm starting to wonder how are we going to manage that.
just found out a new RHEL clone (thanks to distrowatch.com News 03.21.2011) - PUIAS http://puias.math.ias.edu/ is an RHEL clone "... started long before CentOS or other projects were available."
The question is: if CentOS fizzles for whatever reasons, how many will switch to one of the less than 5, one-man-show RHEL clone, how many will dig in and pay for RHEL, and how many will switch to non-RHEL?
Proved? One person suggested it, no one else verified. RH also still distributes all of their source.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
It was just a month ago that FBI proved they had 10-years worth of Backdoors in Theo De Raadt's BSD operating system without his knowledge.
Actually, an audit was done, and the opposite was proven - that there are no secret backdoors. I hope that doesn't strain your reality too much. OpenBSD is still the supreme overlord of security, even from the over-zealous security crowd.
I'm sure most of their revenue is from support contracts but...
I wonder how much of their revenue is from their rather sky high pricing of
classes to get a cert. To a small business or an individual their prices
seem a bit out of line for actual value received. They sure do seem to
have some really nice and costly mailers for those classes too. Last one
I got was 42 pages. Their class track structure seems to have more
tiers than a Chinese rice paddy.
To get decent grounding in RHEL to get a cert or two for it you could spend upwards
of 5 grand and that's without the cost of travel/hotel.
If you went full bore and took all the classes and exams one after the other your
costs would top 20 grand easily. Each class is only 5 days (with cert testing).
Seems a might steep don't ya think?
Yes, RH currently contributes quite a bit. This is good.
But, RH has a history of really stupid stuff:
Shipping gcc cvs head as the next stable version, so they could be, "first to market". This broke things for their users (couldn't compile a kernel for example [hmmm QA much RH?]. Worse, their users misdirected their anger at the gcc devs. Finally gcc just skipped this release version so there would be no more confusion.
Refusing to incorporate patches for RieserFS that Hans Rieser, himself tried to get them to accept. The issue was just that their customers were risking _losing all their data_!
Modifying KDE to get it to fit better with their distro, and breaking it [again, where is the QA?]. RH users again misdirected their anger at the KDE team, who stepped up, and fixed RH's mess.
RH years ago, bought some X servers for hardware that wasn't supported in xfree86. They, initially, kept it closed, as a value add for their distribution, rather than contributing it back. Yup, they are a for profit, but, at the time, RH didn't really contribute much back.
RH also seems to live by the motto not invented here. Great stuff from other distros (mainly Debian), they refuse to incorporate, and usually end up with something moderately to very inferior for more effort.
RH requires a ridiculous support contract for access to patches.
Finally, RH has only 4.8% of the packages Debian has, in a comparison of official stable repositories-- This was RH vs Debian Etch, so comparable vintage. I don't have anything newer RH around to repeat the test with, doubt it is much different, though.
up2date --show-available | wc -l
1125
apt-cache search '.*' | wc -l
23310
echo 1125/23310 | bc -l .04826254826254826254
So, RH is only 4.8% the distribution that Debian is
Fuck. I did click. Now I know. I hope the bastard rots in hell.
They took other people's "altruistic" work. Used it as the basis for their billion dollar business and cut off the "free" part of free software. But I'm sure the people that donated lots of man hours for free feel better because RedHat's owners are loaded.
Dallas Real Estate
The CentOS people themselves have stated that it won't affect them at all.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Even in open source.
Power corrupts, and absolute power is kind of interesting. John Lehman
No jokes about "Begun, the Clone War has"? I'm so disappointed.
Fandroids hate facts.
The one that interests me the most (because it impacts me most directly) is XenServer. It's supposedly based on RedHat as well, and they do a degree of kernel hackery to get all their Xenery to work. I'd be curious to see where that will go, given that XenServer development isn't exactly what you'd call cutting-edge in many regards: Citrix seems to just cut and release, with little regard for many important things like documentation being up to date or full hardware support.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I installed Oracle Linux 6 this week to test. Besides the blinding red color of everything, I was a bit annoyed to see how many times I saw the word "RedHat" in the installer and the boot process.. I mean, if your going to rebrand it, then freaking re-brand it!
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Maximilian Attems, one of the 5 persons maintaining the Linux kernel in Debian, already stated that he believes it is a bad move, that will make his life more complicated. We are talking here about one of the most open and free distribution in this world, with no company to backup the operation. RedHat can go to hell with there billion USD, they now deserve the disrespect of all the community for their greediness.
I went Debian, then Ubuntu years ago and I've never been happier.
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
I seem to recall seeing a statement by Theo himself who basically said that it was true that said government contractor had been hired and paid to write some stuff for OpenBSD some years ago but the code they handed over was never actually used because it was of such poor quality. Nobody even noticed it was loaded up with backdoors on its way to the trash can.
Red Hat submits their patches upstream for inclusion in the main Linux kernel.
According to earlier posts, they even submit them upstream before they include them in the RHEL kernel.
Those upstream submissions are not monolithic/merged, so distros which build from the Linux source instead of a distro's source should not have a problem. That includes Debian.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
If you round off their 2010 income numbers, subscription income totals to $639 million (85.3%), and training service income totals to $110 million (14.6%). That is all on page 40 of their 2010 Annual SEC (10-K) filing. The subscriptions had a 93% profit margin, and the training had a 36% profit margin this year. Which makes sense, I imagine training services cost quite a bit, you would probably have equipment and training material costs, as well as trainer's salaries. Then, at least some of the time, there would be travel and hotel costs incurred for the trainers themselves, anytime they are training groups.
According to page 48 of the same report, they spent $272 on sales and marketing, which the fancy training mailer pamphlets would fall under. However, that would also include expenses from sponsoring Open Source conferences under the same line item (its not all wasted on those fancy pamphlets).
Research and Development I imagine covers salaries for Kernel and subsystem developers. R&D costs total $148 million. Administrative costs were $104 million. According to the 10-K report, they have 3,000 employees globally.
Total operating expense for 2010 was $534 million, once you have tacked on taxes the Net income comes to $87 million.
There is a lot of boring stuff in SEC filings, most always something interesting to learn from them though. If you really want to find out what a company is all about, there are some interesting details, a lot of it is in there. It explains in brief detail what each line item in the Balance Sheets and Income Statements actually mean in mostly plain English. Plus, the executive summary gives you some insight into their management's frame of mind, business model, and strategies.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
What I find interesting, Chris, is that the parent has apparently never seen Goatse before. "Or something".
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
shhhhhhh you'll mess with slashdot group think
Why was this modded down? Screw reality?
You appear to be ignoring the bit where Oracle is developing btrfs and CRFS.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
I think the bit of Oracle Linux which bemused me was the fact that installing Oracle 11g on it is is still non-trivial; it requires you to install a bunch of packages and tweak kernel settings. If you're going to distribute your own brand of Linux, you could at least have an installer option for "This is going to be an Oracle RDBMS server, please install everything I need and configure the kernel as needed". Giving you a script to run as root part way through the RDBMS install process doesn't really cut it.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Well said. Companies have no emotions and cannot be offended. Only people can be. When you hate companies, you push the employees of that company away from you, making it more difficult for them to adopt your view. If you criticize actions, and explain your view, then you might persuade the employees in that company, changing the direction it takes.
In other words; positive feedback when they do good, and negative feedback when they do bad. Hating companies means your view is always negative, meaning that your opinion is worthless.
we recently were stunned by the very high cost of redhat support. Its more expensive than microsoft.
I suspect you were comparing licensing (MS) to support (RH), not support to support.
I wonder how this squares with the GPL. I mean, the GPL clearly specifies Redhat has to release the source
1) in machine-readable form
2) "The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it."
It seems to me it would certainly be a reasonable demand to state the second implies "the source" is the internal Redhat git reposity ... That certainly is redhat's preferred way of modifying it.
Well, CentOS are AGES behind their original schedule on the CentOS 6 release. 5.6 is well behind as well. That's not a basket I'd be putting eggs in right now.
The chip isn't the problem. The real problem comes when the LED attached to the chip starts glowing when you reach thirty years old. Then everyone expects you to submit to your death at Carousel.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
There's an option to mod new users down, or there used to be. I cannot check on this PC as it only has IE7 installed and the slashcode is trying to be clever but it doesn't display the forms /rant
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
CentOS is a free product that the CentOS team (and me personally) have spent 8 years building and releasing. I am tired of people complaining that a free product that saves them $2500.00 a pop every time they use it on a server is not being completed fast enough for their liking. It is if they think they are owed something and are paying thousands of dollars to the CentOS team for the product. They are not. I have never made one thin dime from the production of CentOS. If CentOS meets your need, use it. If you want a product with SLAs and firm deadlines buy something else that has it (like the products from Red Hat). Or offer to pay the salary for 1 or more of the CentOS team members for a year (or more) so that we can make CentOS their only job.
Are you new here? Anonymous Cowards start at Score: 0.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Its really funny, this just a few days after Debian announce that they will ease co-operation with derivatives :
"The Debian Project has taken another important step towards better collaboration with its more than 300 derivative distributions by launching the Debian dErivatives eXchange project (DEX). The core idea behind DEX is to reduce the technical differences (informally called "delta") between Debian and its derivatives. This is mainly accomplished by easing the integration of patches from derivatives. Making available the patches from all derivatives results not only in a better system for all involved parties, but also eases the workload of the derivatives by reducing the differences derivatives have to maintain themselve"
The guys at redhat are going the wrong way.
they're not denying the source. they're just bundling togheter the vanilla kernel AND their own patches, nothing wrong with that from a GPL perspective, there's nothing in the license that says your changes have to come in the form of patches.
What ? Me, worry ?
So basically Red Hat is telling us because they cannot legally change to be a fully closed source project they will just try to go against the spirit of FOSS as much as possible without breaking the letter of it?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I suspect that's just so they can make sure that the plebs use it and only their customers can have ZFS on Linux without a bunch of hassle.
If they made that easy, companies wouldn't need Oracle DBA staffs whose primary job is to deal with Oracle Support, so their support and training business would take a hit. I don't think they really want to make it easy.
CentOS is unaffected, right up until the point you start running into problems... at which point Red Hat's source-hiding antics will make it a real pain to dignose and fix the issue, especially if it's most easily solved by reverting one of the patches.
I agree, however RH fails to realize that whatever code they are applying to the kernel does not belong to them, it belongs to the open source community of Linux, which is an open distribution that everyone is allowed to code for and as such deploy, but can not directly make money from, and this business model that RH says they are using, is supposed to be only for the service and support they offer with their packaged distro, however, keeping code secret, and making it that now what you pay for is the extra code that they are keeping to themselves, that only works on the linux kernel, so you can not say it was developed for anything else, means they are breaking the open license agreement, however, 1 billion dollars can grease a lot of palms, unless of course Linus gets involved...
I know it doesn't drown out all the whiners but please accept my thanks for all your hard work.
I use CentOS on my server and I have nothing but praise for it. Some people like to live on the bleeding edge but for a server OS I appreciate the stability of CentOS.
Don't let the vocal minority get you down.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
If there is a problem introduced with a Red Hat patch, it will be fixed upstream. And since CentOS promises binary compatibility with Red Hat, they tend to just take the Red Hat sources and compile them as is.
And Red Hat isn't hiding their source. They're just not listing kernel patches as broken out. Any kernel developer should be able to look at their existing patch set, compare it to new kernel patches floating around and figure it out. It isn't rocket surgery. Don't make a mountain out of a red hat-rack.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
As a user of Linux since Slackware was on 13 floppies, here's what I don't understand about the distros: Instead of sticking with an old kernel release and backporting patches, why not move forward to the latest kernel? Coming from the days were it was more common than not to compile your own kernel from vanilla source for whatever distro you were using, I've never gotten in trouble doing that. A few times I've left out an option and had to recompile. But I've never had a new vanilla kernel break other aspects of the distro. I used to do this on Slack, Red Hat (years back when their patched versions were often broken), Debian and Gentoo. I still do it when I need recent kernel features on Ubuntu, although when business requires something on CentOS I stick with the RH-patched version there. My experience with Ubuntu: 10.04 and 10.10 run fine with the most recent vanilla kernels, although YMMV, I guess.
Seriously, why do the distros backport to old kernels rather than roll the kernels forward? What they don't backport is often good stuff, which your machine will run happier with. I can see hanging back a few point releases to make sure the kernel version has no major bugs or regressions reported against it, but all the distros allow their kernels to get far too stale, with RH being the worst over time - and to know what your kernel really has in it, you then become dependent on RH rather than kernel.org. Has the policy long been to take the more obscure road to "earn" the support contracts?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Redhat is allowed to do exactly what they are doing. Nothing in the GPL requires them to make their changes available upstream (although they usually do), it requires them to make any changes available to their customers. They still release their changes to the kernel source code, but they changed the way those changes are distributed to their customers.
They used to make these changes available as a patch set that could be applied to the vanilla source from kernel.org. "Enhancers" like Oracle and others would take the vanilla source, cherry pick the patches that they wanted to apply out of Redhat's patch set, and compile the kernel, possibly adding in their own patches. Now Redhat is making the changes available in a single large pre-patched tarball, which means that if Oracle doesn't want to apply all of the patches, then they have to hunt down the changes themselves which is more time consuming and error-prone.
Say Redhat comes up with a patch that tweaks the filesystem code in a way that in some cases makes an Oracle DB 10% slower. In the past, Oracle would just apply all RH patches except that one. Now they have to take the vanilla source, diff it against Redhat's patched source, hunt down all the changes related to that filesystem patch, back those changes out manually, and hope that they got it right.
If only "common" sense was actually that common...
To the other guy who responded to this comment: If your DBA has to call Oracle support to figure out how to install it on Linux then you need a new DBA. It takes 10 minutes to prep a RedHat OS to install Oracle, its not complicated.
As for Oracle Linux, there is a package you can download which will install the pre-reqs called oracle-validated. From the links below:
Named after, and derived from Validated Configurations, oracle-validated also creates an oracle OS user and an oinstall and dba group. Kernel parameters are also set properly, ensuring that the Oracle Universal Installer will proceed without complaints. Very nice!
http://blogs.oracle.com/sergio/2008/08/revisiting_the_oraclevalidated_1.html
http://blogs.oracle.com/AlejandroVargas/2008/10/the_oraclevalidated_rpm_is_ava.html
Pretty simple.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
The Linux kernel doesn't belong to you or me or "the community", it belongs to the copyright holders, with Linus as the arbiter of their rights. Redhat isn't closing the source or keeping anything secret, you've misunderstood both how Redhat works and also how the GPL works.
Nothing in the GPL says that you can't make money directly from GPL'ed software. You're free to take any GPL'ed software, compile it, put it on a CD, and sell it as-is. In fact, that is how Redhat and a lot of others got started. What you can't do is take credit yourself for all of this software (you must attribute the copyright holders) and you can't provide binaries without providing the source as well, including your changes. You also pass along the same rights you have when selling GPL'ed software, which is why CentOS and Scientific Linux can download the source RPM's for RHEL from Redhat and run them through a build script that changes the Redhat logo to something else, builds all of the free bits (about 99% of the distro).
Actually, Redhat could go one step further, and instead of providing the source RPM's to everyone, they could just put them on the DVD with the OS and not make them freely downloadable. They only have to provide source to their customers, not the general public. They know the anyone could buy a DVD and repost the source RPM's, so they just go ahead and make them available to everyone.
If only "common" sense was actually that common...
Linux-Mag covers the Rat Hat decision much better
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/8414/
Increasingly, Red Hat’s major competition is just saying “hey, we’ll let Red Hat do the engineering work and just provide support.” This is true of Oracle, and Novell to a lesser extent. Oracle has been riding on Red Hat’s coattails for years and has said it would do just that, saying that companies should compete “purely on the support side of the business.”
Novell still does its own very fine Linux distro, but if you look carefully, the amount of new features and energy put into its Linux distro the past few years has waned a bit. The company has ramped up support offerings for RHEL in the meantime, and put a lot more energy into things like SUSE Studio.
Oracle is just content to leech off of Red Hat. While Novell is trying to woo customers over to SLES by supporting RHEL as a bridge to SLES, Oracle just freeloads off of Red Hat’s distribution.
It’s a good thing that the GPL and other open source licenses allow companies to jump in and provide support for competitor’s products. But this trend isn’t healthy for the larger community — and it’s not something that can or should be solved by licensing. Companies in the market for Linux services should exercise a little forward thinking and reward the companies that are doing the most to maintain the ecosystem. Here’s a hint: It ain’t Oracle. Even if that Oracle support contract is a bit cheaper than Red Hat’s right now, what do you think Oracle’s going to charge if it manages to marginalize Red Hat?
Bottom line: If you want to snipe at Red Hat for its admittedly community unfriendly change, at least recognize that the company is still doing more than its share of the work.
Copy and paste:
And what's to stop others from doing the same if they have Redhat under another name? If Oracle repackages RHEL who's to stop Oracle customers from installing updated RPMs too?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
There is/will be a web interface for RedHat customers with formal support to see the individual broken-out patches. This move just makes it so that they're not available to non-paying customers. (i.e. Oracle)
>Nothing in the GPL says that you can't make money directly from GPL'ed software
Have you read any of the forms when you try to create a new software and apply for any of the said possible GPL options out there....clear as day, about making money being a no,no....black and white, there are many forms, some partial, some full, but the one that RH is using for Linux seems to me to fall under the one that they can not charge for the said code or the corrections...
Of course, I know nothing about programming, and nothing about computers, and binary to me is just all about
011101010010000001110010001000000111011101110010011011110110111001100111
Sounds a lot different then your first claim, but will allow it, say they do offer the full package as a tarball because they are required to upload it and make it available, then that tarball becomes the patch, not a batch of patches.
As you say, Oracle cherry pciks what they want and leaves the rest, but as a customer i am allowed to pick which patches i download and install, and which i do not want, because xyz reason i think something is unstable in my work environment,
just because RH needs something fixed, does not mean i am ready to create a situation in my environment, which is why rpms allow you to select which to install and which to leave behind....
Based on your description, you are claiming, that RH is forcing users to install all that is part of their package, I would say this would hurt their customer base, more then anything....they managed to make 1billion dollars even with Oracle doing what they do, I would say leave it as is, and keep doing what your doing, as soon as you do fix something that aint broke, you play with fire....i guess only time will tell....
-- There are many types of people in the world, those who work for RH and those who don't
If there is a problem introduced with a Red Hat patch, it will be fixed upstream.
Maybe. Eventually. If it affects a paying Red Hat customer out there somewhere enough. Also note that pre-release kernel source packages are now only available to Red Hat customers - they were taken offline at around the same time as the broken-out patchsets - so you'll probably be waiting a while.
Just ignore them, keep up the good work, and thanks.
http://press.redhat.com/about/news/blog/commitment-to-open/ for the information right from the hacker's mouth.
making it harder for Oracle to clone.
= more proprietary.
The revenue model of the Free Software Foundation was basically give away software and charge for media and support (ok, with the Internet nobody really needs media). There is no requirement in GPL to donate any specific number of lines of code, the only requirement is if you distribute its software you have to give away the source. If Red Hat wants to be able to close the door to cloners than they should switch to the BSD kernel and be done with it. Everything Red Hat does to make it difficult for other entities to use their code goes against the spirit if not the letter of the GPL. Instead of licensing their distribution Red Hat shoulld give away the software then charge for support. That is how it worked before RHEL and is the way it should work today. Red Hat should be happy that other people are using their contributed code rather than feeling violated.
AC, I too want to personally thank you for your efforts and the efforts of the entire CentOS team. I run CentOS at home on my personal server for various tasks.
I feel the same way about Canonical and Red Hat, which is this: once they have enough value built into their product they will stop offering it for free. As it stands right now they are just building their customer base and using free software as a way of doing that.
Based on your description, you are claiming, that RH is forcing users to install all that is part of their package, I would say this would hurt their customer base, more then anything....they managed to make 1billion dollars even with Oracle doing what they do, I would say leave it as is, and keep doing what your doing, as soon as you do fix something that aint broke, you play with fire...
From my understanding, they are still releasing the individual patches to their subscribed customers; it's the public patchset that is now being released as a single patch. Also, their subscribers, while they can pick and chose their patches, are not allowed per their license agreement with RedHat to redistribute the individual patches in the form that they get as subscribers. They could, of course, redistribute the single patches that RedHat is already making available, however.
All of the changes they are making are being made available as per the GPL, and they are still one of the biggest and most active corporate contributers to Linux. I'm not sure about all of the ramifications of what they are doing here, and there may be some reasons why what they are doing is not as open as the community would like, but on the whole, I see what they do as a very positive force in the open source/free software movement. Linux would likely not be where it is today without them.
RTFA is Known to the State of California to cause cancer.
I didn't realize it was based on RedHat at all. My understanding is Xen doesn't even use a Linux kernel and it's based on Nemesis. I'm very poorly educated on the subject, but if you've got some more information I'd like to check it out. We're VMWare customers in the datacenter but I use Xen personally (on CentOS).