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Oracle Makes Red Hat Kernel Changes Available As Broken-Out Patches

Posted by Soulskill on from the hey-why-not dept.

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.'"

4 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. If it wasn't for Oracle Unbreakable Linux by angryfirelord · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:If it wasn't for Oracle Unbreakable Linux by See+Attached · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
  2. Re:Gift horse = Mouth by blade8086 · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  3. Re:Gift horse = Mouth by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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