Introducing RedPatch (Ksplice Blog) [LWN.net]

Introducing RedPatch (Ksplice Blog)

Posted Nov 10, 2012 10:34 UTC (Sat) by boklm (subscriber, #34568)
In reply to: Introducing RedPatch (Ksplice Blog) by Cyberax
Parent article: Introducing RedPatch (Ksplice Blog)

Does the contract allow sending the patches to a 3rd person that will redistribute the patches ?

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Introducing RedPatch (Ksplice Blog)

Posted Nov 10, 2012 13:51 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Yes and no. You can distribute it, no problem (patches are GPLed, after all), but contract is terminated in this case (and can not be renewed).

Introducing RedPatch (Ksplice Blog)

Posted Nov 10, 2012 14:14 UTC (Sat) by bahomet (guest, #87773) [Link]

That most likely would work with a covet 3rdparty.

However, what Oracle aims at and RH tries to prevent is:
- neither access to the knowledge base meant by the patches
(that's fairly accomplished by an RHN subscription)
- nor a crusade for making this knowledge base public
- rather, making a business that builds on this knowledge base

... for which Oracle would need an authentic public distribution of that
knowledge base, and that's exactly what RH stopped to give out.

RedPatch is a clever trick though -- while Oracle cannot publicly use the original knowledge base, it's certainly possible for them to reverse engineer it from public sources and arrive at a freely usable by-and-large equivalent of the original.