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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.
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.
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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.
Under the GPL, my understanding is that RedHat need to make the source code available. This then allows CentOS to grab the source (RPMs) and re-badge/recompile it into a new distribution. So I don't think this distro is going away any time soon.
It means exactly nothing for CentOS. CentOS clones the RH kernel 100% anyways and is not interested in the individual patches. This is only to stop Oracle from selling support contracts for Red Hat installations. So it has exactly nothing to do with cloning and everything to do with support (in order to support RH systems, Oracle would need to know which patches RH has and more importantly: why).
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.
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.
That only gives you the patch broken up in space, not in time.
The idea is that Red Hat has patches for specific issues that are developed at different points in time. These patches may modify the same files as previous ones, or even the same blocks of code. By having all patches applied at once, the singular diff does not tell you which component of the patch fixed which issue.
This is really only relevant for providing commercial support. Previously, by having patches associated with known issues applied sequentially, it was much easier for another company to say "Oh you're having Issue X? Well Patch Y will fix it." Now their options are to reverse-engineer the monolithic .diff to find the part that fixes a specific issue, or tell their customers they have to apply the entire patch. Again, that's not something you'd care about if you're a desktop end-user, but in a corporate IT environment it makes a difference.
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..
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.
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.
Straight clones should still be possible as long as redhat complies with the GPL, the main things their changes to kernel packaging will do it
1: make it harder for unrelated distros (e.g. debian) to pigyback of redhats long term support work for kernel releases 2: make it harder for anyone else to provide high quality support for redhats patched kernels by making it much harder for them to answer the question when something goes wrong of "what did redhat change and why".
Debian does not use Redhat kernels. Two different distributions, packing systems and philosophies.