LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 24, 2003

The new Red Hat Linux

It's official: the Red Hat Linux product is no more. The changes announced by the company can be found discussed, in detail, on the Red Hat Linux Project page. In summary, the changes that have been announced are:

• The Red Hat Linux product will no longer be available as a box on store shelves. Not even in virtual stores. The various Red Hat enterprise products remain, but the low-end distribution as a commercial product from Red Hat is done.

• Development of Red Hat Linux will continue, but the company is trying to move the development of the distribution into a more community-oriented mode. The internal development mailing lists will be opened up, and there will eventually be a way for external maintainers to contribute fixes and packages.

• Red Hat Linux will become more volatile. There will be a six-month release cycle, with no real distinction between major and minor releases. Red Hat will stop backporting security fixes to the version of the relevant package shipped with the distribution release; instead, applying a security fix will mean upgrading to the latest version of the affected program. Red Hat will also work harder at pushing fixes back "upstream," rather than carrying patches themselves.

There are a few implications of this change for Red Hat Linux users. Essentially, if you use Red Hat Linux, you will have to pay more. Either you pay more cash by moving up to the enterprise offerings, or you pay more in effort by finding bugs in the distribution, and, if you can, helping to fix them. A Red Hat Linux box has traditionally been a great bargain: a relatively small amount of money for a stable, well-engineered distribution containing millions of dollars worth of software. Red Hat Linux will remain a good deal, but the terms of the bargain are changing a bit.

For high-clue users who would like to be a part of the distribution development process, the changes will certainly be a good thing. Red Hat has traditionally been developed in a relatively closed mode. Every now and then a new release would show up, but the process by which the development came together was distant and opaque. This distance is one of the reasons why many hackers have preferred more community oriented distributions, such as Debian, Mandrake, or, more recently, Gentoo. Red Hat clearly hopes to tap into the development community by opening things up in this way. If things go well, the result could well be a better, more quickly evolving distribution.

Other users will have to think about whether they want to download and manage new releases themselves, buy a boxed copy from some other retailer (the number of such products is certain to increase), or switch to a different distribution. All three are good options, including the last one. One of the great benefits of using Linux is that you can switch to a different vendor if you don't like where your current vendor is going.

This change is a big step for Red Hat; the company did, after all, get its start by selling boxed Linux distributions at retail. As Linux and the market have evolved, it has become clear that the retail channel is not where the real money is to be made. Red Hat, being a public company needing to bring in serious revenue, is focusing on the markets that, it hopes, will keep it going. So retail sales are out. But Red Hat cannot afford to lose its base distribution and the many people who help test it. Thus the Red Hat Linux Project. With luck, Red Hat can have it both ways: serious revenue from the enterprise market while building a larger development community.

Comments (19 posted)

SCO's new offensive

[This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

As expected, SCO trotted out a new licensing program today that would give Linux users a license from SCO to what SCO claims is their intellectual property in the Linux kernel from 2.4 on. SCO also announced that they had received copyrights for the Unix System V source code.

I sat in on the teleconference that SCO held to announce the new licensing program. McBride did most of the talking during the call, with David Boies adding just a few comments and clarifications, and answering a few questions that were directly addressed to him. I tried to get in the queue to ask a few questions about the impact of the GPL on their plans to offer a license relating to the Linux kernel, but I was not called on. Don Marti, of Linux Journal did get a question in about whether SCO would offer any additional evidence to substantiate their claims, but it was mostly ducked by McBride, though he did affirm that they were not talking about code coming from BSD.

During the call, McBride claimed that "hundreds" of files related to SMP, NUMA and read-copy update (RCU) were infringing on SCO IP either directly or indirectly. According to McBride, if the Linux community were to remove the offending code there would be "little non-infringing code" left in the areas that SCO is claiming rights to. Essentially, SCO seems to be basically claiming ownership of most of the advancements in scalability whether they are directly taken from SCO's codebase or not. Also, McBride noted that some of the code that they claim infringes on their IP was not contributed by IBM, though he did not specify which vendor(s) he believed to be responsible.

Other than announcing the new plan and the copyright registration, very little information was forthcoming. Essentially, they intend to offer a license of some kind that would idemnify companies from possible suits for copyright violations. Pricing was not disclosed, though McBride hinted that it would be equitable or similar to UnixWare 7.1.3 licensing. It will also likely be a per-server, per-CPU situation.

Though SCO did not disclose all of the license terms today, it doesn't seem possible that the company would be able to abide by the terms of the GPL while charging for licenses to run their IP in conjunction with Linux. Even if SCO actually legitimately holds claim over code that's being used in the kernel, the voluntary act of licensing that code should require SCO to allow distribution of the same code under the GPL. According to Section 2b of the GNU GPL:

And, if that weren't enough, Section 4 enjoins anyone from sublicensing programs under the GPL:

Even "hundreds of files" would still be considered a derivative of the Linux kernel -- the majority of which is still uncontestedly free and clear of SCO's IP. If you take the folks from SCO at their word, and assume that they really do own claim to these "hundreds of files," they're ultimately useless without the remainder of the Linux kernel -- which is still under the GPL.

And it's far from clear that SCO has legitimate claim over any code being used in the Linux kernel. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, SCO did not directly address the issue of how they could license code that's already been distributed as part of the Linux kernel as a separate component that would not fall under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

McBride also made a point of emphasizing that the SCO license would be for "binary format." Which is puzzling, since SCO does not seem to be offering to distribute any kind of new code or new kernel -- simply a license that would give SCO's blessing to using code already available in the Linux kernel. McBride made the point several times that SCO would not be offering source code licenses.

While SCO's antics have most of the Linux community seeing red, someone out there is responding well. SCO's share price has jumped more than a dollar today, and looks likely to close above $13 for the first time in a year.

On the IBM front, Boies was asked whether there were any new developments in SCO's case against IBM. Boies said that he had "nothing to add" and that "as a litigator, I assume cases are going to court resolution." Boies also noted that a lack of resolution in the IBM case will not stop SCO from going forward with other plans based on claiming IP infringement in Linux.

In a nutshell, SCO is formalizing a plan to try to charge companies for the privilege of using Linux or sue them for not doing so. Whether companies will be willing to do so remains to be seen. If they do so, it will basically be on SCO's say-so that they own the rights that they are trying to sell.

Comments (50 posted)

The end of the road revisited

It has now been one year since we posted, in the July 25, 2002 Weekly Edition, the notice that LWN.net was to be shut down as a result of its financial problems. The staff had been working without salaries for months, and nothing we had tried seemed to work. It was a hard thing to face, but the only option we seemed to have was to pull the plug. As we said:

What happened then, of course, can only be described as a last-minute miracle. LWN readers started making donations at levels we had never seen before, and we decided to rethink things one more time. What we came up with is the subscription scheme which has supported LWN over the last year.

It is hard not to feel good about how far LWN has come. It is paying its bills (as long as we keep the bills small), and we are answerable directly to our readers. We have managed to make a number of improvements to our content and to the site; traffic is at an all-time high. In some ways, LWN looks more healthy than it has ever been. Certainly, we are glad that LWN did not shut down after all.

That said, it is important to note that the problem is still not completely solved. Salaries remain low, and money for things like travel to trade shows (important in this line of work) remains scarce. We also very much need to bring in one more editor to fill out the content and make it possible for the rest of us to take an occasional vacation. That editor remains a distant dream for now, however.

What we need to do, of course, is bring in more subscriptions. Recent changes have helped in that regard; the number of subscribers has been going up after a few months of little change. We are working at actively promoting the site - for the first time in its history - as a way of bringing in more readers. We'll get there. Meanwhile, we are glad to still be here. Many thanks to all of LWN's readers; your support for us over the last five and a half years has been amazing. Miraculous, even.

Comments (19 posted)