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Oracle Makes Red Hat Kernel Changes Available As Broken-Out Patches
Artefacto writes "The Ksplice team has made available a git repository with the changes Red Hat made to the kernel broken down. They are calling this project RedPatch. This comes in response to a policy change Red Hat had implemented in early 2011, with the goal of undercutting Oracle and other vendors' strategy of poaching Red Hat's customers. The Ksplice team says they've been working on these individual patches since then. They claim to be now making it public because they 'feel everyone in the Linux community can benefit from the work.' 'For Ksplice, we build individual updates for each change and rely on source patches that are broken-out, not a giant tarball. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to take the right patches to create individual updates for each fix, and to skip over the noise — like a change that speeds up bootup — which is unnecessary for an already-running system.'"
Yes, and I'm sure Oracle-owned K-Splice has NO alterior motive for doing this, esp considering the RH change was purportedly made in response to oracles so-called 'unbreakable linux' (Aka oracles for-$ RHEL builds)
If you want a real enterprise class O.S. ditch RHEL and go with Solaris 11.
First Post
Red Hat wouldn't need to start obfuscating their patches in the first place. You'd think with all the billions of dollars Oracle and its consultants mooches off of companies that they would at least be able to develop their own Linux distribution instead of relying on something else.
release patches that upgrades Oracle 9 to 11.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Better cover that RedPatch with an iPad
Would be nice if Oracle would break out their MySQL patches.
It's a matter of simple economics. A long story, short: RH is developing some of the Open Source wares out there but they have to pay for this work, they have to pay for the QA that they are doing on the products so they sell support for RHEL.I'd say perfectly acceptable, given that they return something to the community. Oracle says, why pay RH for RHEL when all is Open Source anyway ? We better get what RH is doing, for free, change the label, sell our support and make some easy money. Perfectly legal and acceptable in a capitalistic world. Now, if whoever made that decision would have seen past their tiny noses, they would have realized that doing exactly that would undermine RH's ability to develop and implicitly the quality of the OS that they take and resell .... Sounds like shooting themselves in the foot ? And everybody else using Linux commercially around them ? Looking at the numbers widely available on the Internet, you will see that RH has a 13 % contribution to the kernel while Oracle a mere 2 %, we can probably extend safely the same numbers for other products in the RHEL etc.. Who should we trust for giving us a better commercially supported OS ? I am not a conspiracy theory guy but wouldn't linux disappearance (exagerated !) offer direct benefit to... Solaris ... which is owned by Oracle ..... Hmmmm !?
this just seems like a wasted cost by Oracle to maintain a large parallel fork. Oracle could simply pay Red Hat to maintain the changes that Oracle's customers require. Instead, they are having to develop their own in-house Red Hat Linux development team. That's certainly got to be a more expensive and less efficient route than paying Red Hat to do the work for them.
Red Hat's blobs have been discussed at great length on Slashdot.
Where are Oracle's testicles? Larry has a pussy? Oracle is sinking lower and lower? Normally someone stands up for the benefits which are given to them. In this case small-ball Larry or any of his sons appears to have abused their undersized gifts; it is known that small men with small penises tend to overdo their fits. The father of the chickens children with small-sized genitals should amend and rather help out - RedHat is no large enemy; it is not the Red Army. Microsoft is. Apple may become, and currently with far larger pockets than RedHat or Microsoft.
Spending corporate money on this? Oh, so let us read what they have say, shall we? At https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/introducing_redpatch we can read:
"To understand why we've created this project we'll need a little history. In early 2011, Red Hat changed how they released their kernel source, going from a tarball that had individual patch files to shipping the kernel source as one giant tarball with a single patch for all Red Hat-introduced changes. For most people who work in the kernel this is merely an inconvenience; driver developers and other out-of-kernel module developers can see the end result to make sure their module still performs as expected."
Well, so they keep using RedHat's work, as all other do too, btw. But now, they break it out and make it more readily available to others. So, maybe the Larriones do have some pubertal indications after all.
Still, what does Oracle to for Linux, which makes them exempt for common courtesy?
Here is an two month old article http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/blogs/browse/2012/08/oracle-leading-linux-then-and-now
which argues that Oracle does a lot of things for Linux. Hmmm... Maybe there are more than five inches after all?
Still, at http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/oracles-new-kernel-rhel-clone-real-truth
we can read:
"Don't get me wrong, Oracle does contribute to kernel and other open source development. In fact, Oracle was one of the top 20 employers by kernel contributions from the 2.6.33 kernel (as measured by Greg Kroah-Hartman). Specifically, Oracle was responsible for about 1.3% of the changesets in 2.6.33, just after AMD with 1.6%, and kernel heavyweights Texas Instruments and Fujitsu (1.9% each), and Nokia (3.0%). It's far, far behind Red Hat's 11.6% and even IBM's 4.8%."
Ok, more than five, but not by much... Still, the backing is definitely supported by Larry Ellison - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4-5z5l2HjA
So, in summary, RedHat was at that time doing a lot more of changes, but pushed them out as solid patches, with little or effort to ease it for other users; and it appears to have been an effort to stall competitors like Oracle.
Where are Oracle's testicles? Between Larry's and his sons legs. Larry has a pussy? No.
This is business. Show me yours, I'll show you mine. Code, of course.
WTH?
Does this rambling rant mean you hate Oracle and Larry Ellison and have some deep seated mental issue related to your hate?
No, it means that people rant about anything Oracle does, while knee-jerk supporting RedHat.
Oracle is doing business and Larry and his sons are doing fine. /G.
There fixed the title
If 'Oracle Linux' is a whole independent distro, then why does Oracle have to clone RHEL update service?
"The Ksplice team has made available a git repository"
The Ksplice team have stolen Red Hats kernal patches.
"This comes in response to a policy change Red Hat had implemented in early 2011, with the goal of undercutting Oracle and other vendors' strategy of poaching Red Hat's customers".
What other vendors are attempting to poach Red Hat customers?
AccountKiller
Because that would work. I would happily sue John Does here, in the middle of the East European nowhere; it wouldn't cost me a dime, I'm sure and justice would prevail.
What's with your fascination about Ellison's genitals? Is this thing supposed to have the kind of sexual innuendo as it has?
How is this news? Anyone can get the current sources for any Redhat package, customer or not. Those sources contain the patches. All Oracle is doing is downlaoding them and importing them into git and making that git repo public. The company I work for already did the same thing since we use a custom kernel but still want the Redhat patches.
You're looking at *one* specific release. What if Oracle only once sent in code and it made it into 2.6.33? You need a larger dataset in order to come up with anything significant.
What sort of code was committed? If it were some hardware drivers for SUN hardware they made themselves, it's not that much benefit to other companies, only to a few end users that buy very expensive SUN hardware to run Linux on it, that will run just as well on "generic" hardware that's in a lower price class. I'm not saying that's what happened, but you need to factor this in before you come up with any conclusions.
The RedHat patches that are released as a big bunch, are the patches they backported to the "old" kernel they base their Enterprise distribution on. These are not *new* patches that are sent upstream to be merged in new kernels, to fix unfixed bugs or support new hardware or features. RedHat backports security, stability and in some cases new hardware to the old kernel. These are merely existing patches that are being applied to an old kernel. Only maintainers/users of clones of RedHats' Enterprise Linux benefit from this. Anyone that wants to use a new kernel has no use for these, since they are already in the new kernel by default.
RedHat also contributes to a lot of the *new* features and drivers in the kernel. They don't make any hardware themselves, but they fix other vendors hardware drivers if they are buggy. They are large contributors in several filesystems, SElinux and many other parts of the kernel.
No, I don't work for RedHat, nor hold any of their certifications. I in fact do have certifications for Oracle Solaris products. I think both products by themselves are pretty good, but I despise the business practices or Oracle and the way they continuously rip their employees, the open source community and their customers another one at any opportunity they can find or create.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
is dat sum meme arrows?
It will come with the "Ask" toolbar and will require your homepage to be set to ask.com.
You cron will host automatic updates that will run silently in the background and will secretly update whether you like it or not.
Ah... and your browsers will all get FREE "RedPatch Console" addons/plugins that will make them unstable and take up RAM.
Oracel wants to control everything from the silicon up to the software. This was the message Hurd gave at an opening of the 25th Anniversary of Sparc at the Computer HIstory Museum in Mountain View a few weeks back.
Red Hat has contributed ALOT to make the Linux community a soild environment and the last thing we need is Oracle undermining a company like Red Hat.