Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore [LWN.net]

Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Posted Oct 19, 2010 14:25 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
Parent article: Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

This article certainly has some strong opinions but it lacks the strength in factual accuracy.

"Larrys trash talking of Red Hats update policies is a bit of a low blow considering that RHEL 5 is nearing the end of its life and RHEL 6 is only months away."

Wrong.

http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/

http://www.redhat.com/rhel/server/extended_lifecycle_supp...

"End of Production 3 phase: March 31, 2014
End of Extended Life Cycle phase: March 31, 2017"

"But the non-proprietary nature of Linux distributions is a myth. Clearly RHEL is a proprietary product,"

Not so clear to me. The justification is pretty thin considering all the sources are open and that's just the start. The author seems to be mixing up backporting and proprietary value adds as well among other things.

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Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Posted Oct 19, 2010 14:36 UTC (Tue) by kerick (subscriber, #53036) [Link] (8 responses)

I agree, the author seems to be hand-picking facts and giving in to bias/fear. I see no mention of CentOS in the article, nor do I see a solid fact that Oracle Linux is a threat to RedHat. At least it will keep us off the big Solaris stack Ellison wants to cram down our throats.

This one is nice:
"Instead, hes going to put his own features into the Linux kernel, features that are nakedly intended to favor Oracles own software and hardware."

Like that is completely different than what IBM does with S/390 or in general.

Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Posted Oct 19, 2010 15:15 UTC (Tue) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link] (7 responses)

I see no mention of CentOS

There is one:

If you think that calling RHEL proprietary is just a figure of speech, think again. While Red Hat may tolerate CentOS and other cloners (provided that they strip out Red Hat trademarks), it does not approve of customers who want to use genuine RHEL without paying for it

He's still nuts though. The only way you can build a case for RHEL being proprietary is if you redefine the word to mean something other than what everyone else uses it to mean. In this case, he appears to be using it to mean 'paid for' or 'commercial', which it is. I would hazard a guess that this comes from the same misunderstanding that usually paints free software as unsupported and proprietary software as supported, but rather than the usual cry of "the Free stuff isn't supported" we've moved on to "the supported stuff isn't Free".

In a nutshell; usual 'analyst' rubbish, of anthropological interest only.

Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Posted Oct 19, 2010 15:24 UTC (Tue) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

>In a nutshell; usual 'analyst' rubbish, of anthropological interest only.

Goes without saying if they say that linux is democratic. :)

Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Posted Oct 19, 2010 16:56 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (2 responses)

It's interesting in that this is exactly the same _proprietary_ refrain that Shuttleworth has levelled at Red Hat bacl in 2007, but its being used for pretty much the opposite effect here.

Whereas Shuttleworth has tried to paint Red Hat as proprietary to standup Canonical as the more community friendly, less proprietary, better alternative. Here we have an analyst using the exact same name-calling to make the argument that Oracle is going to be the _more_ proprietary better alternative. That Oracle is going to be better at supporting customers because they aren't going to play nicey-nice and are going to drive customization and differentiation deep into the kernel for the benefit of Oracle customers.

Name calling aside, I think its refreshing to see a company's intentions so forthrightly stated. "Oracle: We are going to unabashedly fork the linux kernel and you'll love paying us for it!" Though the number of referrals to existing vendors undermines the message a bit.

-jef

Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Posted Oct 20, 2010 12:44 UTC (Wed) by gowen (guest, #23914) [Link] (1 responses)

Thanks for bringing the subject matter back to Shuttleworth and Ubuntu, Jef. Whatever would we do without you?

Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Posted Oct 20, 2010 16:55 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

Firstly, I didn't actually say Ubuntu. I'd appreciate it if you didn't put words in my mouth, I might stub a toe on them later.

Secondly, I made an honest effort to find when other people have made the claim this sort of public posting in the past that painted Red Hat as proprietary. I honestly did not find anything since the mention from 2007 ascribed to the author I cited. I pointed out there year of the quote to show that its not a commonly held idea nor is it novel.

But I can go further back...back to 2004 when Sun's Jonathan Schwartz tried to do the same sort of name-calling. It didn't stick then either.

There is a history of Red Hat competitors (and their supporters or surrogates) attempting to paint Red Hat as proprietary. First with Sun, then with Canonical, now it seems with Oracle. I guess for completeness I should make an effort to find a historical reference from someone from Novell making the claim as well.

-jef

Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Posted Oct 21, 2010 20:00 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

"redefine the word to mean something other than what everyone else uses it to mean."

Actually, he's using it in the sense that it had before Microsoft redefined it. RHEL *I*S* proprietary - it's owned by Red Hat.

Who remembers the Windows NT advertising - "Windows is *open*, Unix is *proprietary*". That was the campaign that successfully redefined the word "proprietary".

And it's that redefinition that is now causing us grief with the "belief" that "Free Software isn't proprietary so anybody can help themselves to it and use it however they like".

Let's give the word "proprietary" back its proper meaning - Free Software IS proprietary - people own it. They just choose to share it rather than hoard it.

Cheers,
Wol

Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Posted Oct 22, 2010 6:50 UTC (Fri) by jmm82 (guest, #59425) [Link]

RHEL does not "own" the Linux kernel outright and that is why all their changes are public. Red Hat could make enough of the RHEL userspace private and closed source so that centOS would not be possible. The userspace pieces of RHEL that are "fully owned" have been left open to the public for the most part.

Definition of open

Posted Oct 24, 2010 9:47 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

That makes no sense. Under which definition is Microsoft Windows open? Because that definition is plainly wrong. Windows is proprietary in most senses of the word: proprietary code, development, API, filesystems, trademark, patents, you name it. Only the existence of free software clones and the fact that you can develop for the platform without telling Microsoft leaves a door to say "open" if you are cheeky enough. And only some aberrations such as Apple iOS (closed platform) or Oracle Java (reimplement and you are sued) can claim to be more closed.

From another point of view: in which sense are the old proprietary Unices more closed?

Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Posted Oct 19, 2010 15:46 UTC (Tue) by Xman (guest, #10620) [Link] (4 responses)

Yup. This article appears to make ridiculous claims about what proprietary means (and in fairness, the RedHat binaries are proprietary, but it ends there, and that is an important distinguishing characteristic). It also doesn't consider how ill conceived the approach that Oracle has *claimed* to be taking. The joy of open source is that if you fork, you get stuck maintaining the fork, and that chews up almost as much in the way of resources as building your own product.

Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Posted Oct 20, 2010 2:23 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (2 responses)

> and in fairness, the RedHat binaries are proprietary

No. In fairness, Red Hat's logos and other trademarks are proprietary. If you can strip the binary packages of those, you can redistribute the rest just fine. All of it is open source after all.

This is precisely why CentOS exists. Doing the above is hard. It would also require someone to have access to the binary updates via subscription. It is easier in the long term to strip the source of marks, rebuild and distribute that. Particularly because this allows CentOS to have its own branding and patches, where required.

Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Posted Oct 20, 2010 11:36 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

You can redistribute it even if the trademarks are there. You just can't *trade* in it.

Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Posted Oct 20, 2010 22:51 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Yeah, point taken.

Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Posted Oct 20, 2010 10:27 UTC (Wed) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link]

No. You can not distribute them without giving out the source. That's the point.