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

Gift horse = Mouth

[blade8086]

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)

Re:Gift horse = Mouth

[sethmeisterg]

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

Re:Gift horse = Mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

How eviiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiil of them to make the individual patches available for all. Slaughtering babies isn't even this evil.

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.

Re:Gift horse = Mouth

[zidium]

Yeah, it's called a "hostile fork", and several good projects have **died** because of it.

I remember the first ED2K GUI client for UNIX, xMule. The coder seemed to work on it full-time, because, he said, he believed in creating a secure messaging/sharing mechanism to use in dictatorships and such. Then along came aMule, which started off as a full copy of his GPL code. They even replaced all of the copyright licenses and removed his name from every file except brief mention in a hidden document. Then they proceeded to copy every single change he did. It seemed they were copying quickly while he was slowly developing. Then, all over the Internet (especially the wikipedia page), they would attack him personally and his project.

I still used it until he gave up on it completely (he said it wasn't worth the heartache of being attacked for trying to create something useful for people) after about a year. He would always say he had no alternative under the GPL. That there was nothing he could do except take down the public SVN access and mash up all the source into one gigantic file, but even that didn't stop the copiers.

Re:Gift horse = Mouth

[MysteriousPreacher]

Ulterior in the sense that shooting someone 30 times suggests murder as an ulterior motive.

Re:Gift horse = Mouth

[Anonymous Coward]

He would always say he had no alternative under the GPL.

Then, clearly, he didn't know what he was talking about. Licenses don't apply to the copyright holder; they apply to redistributers. He could certainly have release xMule as binary-only, or as open source with a license that prohibits copying and redistribution (think Microsoft's "Shared Source" licenses). Perhaps he didn't want to do those things, given his goals in creating the project, but to say he had no choice is simply nonsense.

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.

Re:Gift horse = Mouth

[TypoNAM]

Well, the GPL gives you the right to modify anything as long as you license it under the GPL and include the license, and that would include the copyright notices.

The GPL gives nobody such rights to remove/move copyright notices. You only have the right to append your name and year to such a notice when you contribute changes to the work. Original copyright notices must be left alone as Kjella mentioned for United States in USC 17506(d), and it is required in the GPL as mentioned on the FAQ: I want to get credit for my work. I want people to know what I wrote. Can I still get credit if I use the GPL?.

Otherwise we'd have a problem with something like the BSD advertising clause.

The classic BSD license is incompatible with the GPL as only the so called revised or new BSD licenses that removed the advertising clause are compatible with the GPL as stated in the FAQ: Why is the original BSD license incompatible with the GPL?. So now would you please stop making assumptions and actually read the license you so carelessly claim it allows people to do things it clearly does not.

RHEL....

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want a real enterprise class O.S. ditch RHEL and go with Solaris 11.

Re:RHEL....

[blade8086]

So you're saying - if you want a real 'enterprise class' OS, be sure you are using an Oracle(TM) Brand Product? (either ksplice or solaris)?

One reason to have faster bootup is to get a

[Anonymous Coward]

First Post

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.

Re:If it wasn't for Oracle Unbreakable Linux

[VortexCortex]

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.

FYI: CentOS exists. You'd think with all of Red-Hat's money they would at least be able to give back the patches to their downstream in a usable separated form, considering that's how they got them from upstream sources. I'm against any form of making it harder for your users to support themselves, even if your business is the support business. I just vote with my feet and wallet, and stopped using and recommending them.

By your logic, one could make the statement: "You'd think with all the free software Red-Hat and their consultants mooches off of Linux and other upstream FLOSS projects they would at least be able to develop their own Kernels and Compilers instead of relying on the existing work of others."

Don't like Oracle much either, but I take open sourced work wherever available.

Re:If it wasn't for Oracle Unbreakable Linux

[srh2o]

Go practice your trolls and come back. Nothing says dated and 5 years ago like mentioning Linux Hater's Blog

Re:If it wasn't for Oracle Unbreakable Linux

[angryfirelord]

I can see what you're saying, but the problem with that comparison is that Red Hat does contribute back in other ways to the community. They're one of the largest contributors to the Linux kernel and they've also paid developers to create their own projects, such as with the nouveau driver. Meanwhile, Oracle seems to go in the opposite direction, such as the recent moves with MySQL. So, from an ethical perspective, Red Hat is a hell of a lot higher compared to Oracle or other companies.

Now waiting for Red Hat to

[roc97007]

release patches that upgrades Oracle 9 to 11.

RedPatch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Better cover that RedPatch with an iPad

MySQL

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:From an accounting perspective

[fnj]

No, but it's damn good evidence that it's not being run inefficiently.

flawed statistics

[dutchwhizzman]

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.