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 15:46 UTC (Tue) by Xman (guest, #10620)
In reply to: Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore by rahulsundaram
Parent article: Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

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.

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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.