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.'"

Comments

If it wasn't for Oracle Unbreakable Linux

[angryfirelord]

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.

Re:If it wasn't for Oracle Unbreakable Linux

[See Attached]

Based on the job Oracle does maintaining their Tech Stacks, they would destroy the kernel. Case in point, the huge security issue with Java that Oracle feels best to be fixed in February. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/javacpuoct2012-1515924.html#PatchTable Just because you can, doesn't mean you should republish source code developed and collimated at considerable expense by someone else. Responsibility? http://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/08/28/protecting-users-against-java-security-vulnerability/ ?? Wait till February. Anonymous's best friend.

Now waiting for Red Hat to

[roc97007]

release patches that upgrades Oracle 9 to 11.

Re:Gift horse = Mouth

[Billly Gates]

It is free. .. unless you didn't buy that Oracle RDBMS license?

Re:Gift horse = Mouth

[blade8086]

I have 0% problem with the patches - but 100% problem with the dishonesty motivating the effort and the lack of transparency behind it.

Re:Gift horse = Mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't claim to be doing it out of altruism. They quite clearly say they are doing it for their own benefit.

MySQL

[Anonymous Coward]

Would be nice if Oracle would break out their MySQL patches.

Re:Gift horse = Mouth

[Ash Vince]

Who cares? It's a free source of individual patches. Enjoy it while it lasts.

That sort of attitude is incredibly short sited.

Red Hat have contributed a HUGE amount to the open source community over the years. If they were pushed under by Oracle taking all their work and selling it at half the price (this is effectively what Oracle do) then these patches will dry up forever and Linux will lose its largest and most open source friendly commercial distributor. At that point Oracle may well pick up the majority market for commercially supported Linux and they will be far worse to the open source community than Red hat are.