Reciprocity

Reciprocity

Posted Oct 26, 2006 22:58 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
Parent article: Oracle's Red Hat rip-off (Linux-Watch)

This is a good example what open source is all about. Oracle promised in their press release that they will fix more bugs than Red Hat (something I personally find hard to believe), but they may not realize (yet) that every fix they put in and every day they prolong the life of RHEL, they enable Red Hat to do exactly the same thing, having no advantage at all.

Also, if they are really after killing Red Hat, they have to understand that fixes will stop coming from upstream if Red Hat goes out of business. With that, the brilliant patch backporting that Red Hat did with RHEL will go away too, as well as well respected hackers in the community (remember what Linus said: he doesn't trust companies, he trusts people). It wouldn't be long in such a scenario before people start asking themselves why are their daily patches coming out as quarterly jumbo fix releases and why are their Internet facing machines being compromised with exploits for which there was a fix available months ago.

Sure, Oracle have huge financial power to crush Red Hat by making a loss on OS support and not caring one bit about it. But, the tables may turn quickly if they go ahead and actually carry that out without taking on board all of the engineers that make Red Hat what it is today.

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