Canonical Goes It Alone with Unity

Posted May 23, 2010 2:05 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: Canonical Goes It Alone with Unity by rahulsundaram
Parent article: Canonical Goes It Alone with Unity

anyone who tried to use Oracle in the early days of their 'linux' support will remember how it only would run on RedHat. I didn't pursue it far enough to figure out exactly which feature they depended on, but it was known at the time that it was a kernel issue, you couldn't replace the stock RedHat kernel with a vanilla kernel without applying redhat patches to it and have it work.

the new 2.6 development model was created specifically to address these sorts of problems.

I'm not saying that when RedHat implemented a feature they did so to deliberately lock users in to their flavor of Linux, but when the upstream developers went a different direction and didn't accept what they had already shipped to customers (and had companies like Oracle depend on) that's the effect that it had.

Canonical Goes It Alone with Unity

Posted May 23, 2010 3:12 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

What you are saying now doesn't require a non-upstreamed kernel feature and since you didn't point out any specific feature, I don't think that was the cause. Red Hat upstreamed and backported several features from 2.5 series and maybe Oracle was depending on one of them. Since you aren't claiming that Red Hat was deliberating hoarding patches, it throws out the idea of competition having any effect. If you could show any case where upstream went in a different direction and that causing ISV's to depend on Red Hat specific features, I would be very interested to hear about that. In my understanding, there is no such case. If there was a pattern of such behavior, it should be trivial to point out a few of them.