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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.'"

10 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. Gift horse = Mouth by blade8086 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)

    1. Re:Gift horse = Mouth by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    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.

    4. Re:Gift horse = Mouth by zidium · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
  2. RHEL.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  3. 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:If it wasn't for Oracle Unbreakable Linux by VortexCortex · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  4. RedPatch? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Better cover that RedPatch with an iPad