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 21:57 UTC (Tue) by ITAnalyst (guest, #70727)
In reply to: Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore by nteon
Parent article: Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Dear Fanboys,

Jeff Gould here, author of the incriminated article on Oracle Linux and Red Hat. Yep, even analysts whose articles are of anthropological interest only (dixit Ewan) look at LWN, at least occasionally.

Anyway, thanks for the comments. Please dont think Im offended by the name calling, thats quite all right (my mother did not neglect to teach me those famous words, Sticks and stones will break my bones).

To salvarsan, pardon me in advance for calling attention to the mildly idiotic nature of your remarks, but you leave me little choice. Im not implying youre an idiot simply because you called me a paid corporate propagandist with no evidence (for the record I had no interaction whatever with Oracle about this article, and certainly no payment, but hey, if Larry wants to send me a check). But I do find that you are somewhat, er, cognitively challenged for reaching the conclusion that an article which portrays Larry Ellison as a ruthless cynic is ipso facto a defense of Oracle. Well, OK, I admit it, I am in favor of unfettered competition and I do believe that free markets are fueled by self-interest, so I guess I dont really have a problem with Ellisons cynicism. But I am glad I dont work for the guy, and youre still an idiot. Perhaps you should check out some of my previous writings about Oracle before concluding that Im in Larrys pocket, e.g. theopenenterprise.org/analysis/larry-ellison-on-java-freedom-i-was-for-it-before-i-was-agai.html.

To rahulsundaram who says my article lacks the strength in factual accuracy because of my admittedly garbled account of the forthcoming transition from RHEL 5 to RHEL 6, pardon me for misusing the technical term end of life in regard to RHEL 5. I acknowledge that RHEL 5 will merely transition to a new stage in its life cycle after the release of RHEL 6. But to someone who is keen on having the utmost strength in factual accuracy, allow me to mention that you have completely gone weak in your understanding of the point I was making, nonetheless stated in plain English, namely that for Ellison to accuse Red Hat of being four years behind in its updates only a short time before the official launch of RHEL 6 is particularly unfair.

To kerick who claims to have seen no mention of CentOS in my article, I was about to say ~~are you blind, man?~~ please look again, but I see that ewan (he or she of the anthropological bent) beat me to it.

To all of you who simply cant get over the idea that someone would call RHEL proprietary, you are at least correct in deducing that this (rather than some imaginary attempt to shill for Oracle) was the main point of my article. That you are collectively incapable of seeing this plain truth is a testament to the power of the open source reality distortion field. Im not using the word proprietary in the lawyers sense of intellectual property rights (though some of those are involved), but in the ordinary language sense of differentiated with a view to achieving competitive advantage in the market (and possible some degree of customer lock-in). And no, Ewan, that ordinary sense doesnt reduce to just paid for or commercial. RHEL is a body of code that has been carefully and strategically crafted to be different than and, at least in intent, technically superior to other Linux distributions. The fact that the code and the patches are all GPLd makes absolutely no difference to this proprietary intent. And that is not a bad thing. It is on the contrary both a very good thing, and absolutely indispensable to Red Hats ability to survive and thrive as an extremely successful commercial software venture.

Why many of you cant accept these rather ordinary and obvious statements of fact is probably a matter not for anthropology (pace ewan) but for theology. Im an atheist myself, but also a libertarian, so I respect your right to believe in the purity and sanctity of non-proprietary open source, just as I respect the right of creationists to believe that God created the world in six days. But I wouldnt want those people going near my kids biology class, just as I wouldnt want you in charge of our economy (or any important piece thereof).

to post comments

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

Posted Oct 19, 2010 22:37 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (7 responses)

Is that the ordinary language definition of proprietary? Hmm.

Is Beyer brand aspirin still considered proprietary when there are generic aspirins on the market sharing shelf space but not sharing consumer brand recognition or loyalty? I'm not sure that ordinary people speaking ordinary language would consider it so. I certainly don't think of Beyer aspirin as proprietary. Beyer is certainly brand differentiated, and is priced at a premium compared to "generic" options...but proprietary?

-jef

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

Posted Oct 19, 2010 23:30 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (6 responses)

> Is that the ordinary language definition of proprietary? Hmm.

Is "proprietary software" an ordinary use of the word "proprietary" in the first place? Hmm.

We could all uselessly argue about the meaning of "proprietary" for ages. But the main point of Jeff's article was basically to... explain what he meant by this word. So *the way he meant it* seems perfectly clear to me.

I can understand that Zealots of the Free are easily offended when strangers misuse the words of their sacred books, but I am sure there are many more interesting comments to make on Jeff's article actual *opinion* than starting religious wars on his inaccurate language or form. "High standards", etc.

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

Posted Oct 19, 2010 23:58 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (3 responses)

A lot of miscommunication comes down to a too-clever choice in defining of abstract terms for your own purposes, instead of showing restraint and using words with plain meaning as your target audience would use them.

Many such regrettable mismatches between an author's definition and the readership definition can be accounted for when an author is using what would be considered field-specific terminology when attempting to write for a layreadership and causes inadvertent confusion. That is regrettable but certainly understandable.

It's however a completely different situation when an author makes up a definition on the spot that is not actually already in common usage colloquially and justifies it as a common layperson usage of the term. Such forcible re-definition is abhorrent when the goal is clear communication of any fact or opinion. Such activity is prevalent when the end goal is not communication but agenda specific efforts to manipulate readership ( akin to push polling) and is something that can raise an eyebrow or two to people sensitive to manipulative efforts posing as editorial commentary.

-jef

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

Posted Oct 20, 2010 10:18 UTC (Wed) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]

> A lot of miscommunication comes down to a too-clever choice in defining of
> abstract terms for your own purposes, instead of showing restraint and
> using words with plain meaning as your target audience would use them.

Exactly, there is a very good word for what Jeff Gould meant, and that is "custom" (or "customized").

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

Posted Oct 21, 2010 20:11 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Except that it is the software industry (actually, MICROSOFT) who changed the meaning of the word "proprietary". And the Free Software world is desperately clinging to the Microsoft meaning of the word.

It would do everybody a great favour if we could return the word back to it's original meaning (as understood by the rest of the world) - just look at the word! It is derived from the word PROPERTY, and merely by virtue of being copyright, software is PROPERTY. Therefor, it is proprietary. And that includes linux, gcc, PostgreSQL, you name it.

Just because we choose to share it doesn't stop us owning it. Doesn't stop it being property. Doesn't stop it being proprietary.

Cheers,
Wol

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

Posted Oct 22, 2010 17:34 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Linguists 101: Etymology is not definition. The fact that the word "proprietary" derives from a Latin word having to do with owners (and not as you've claimed from the English word property which comes via French) does not define the word.

A good rule of thumb is, if you think the meaning of a word is such that it is always redundant (as would be "proprietary" of software in this vague sense) then you probably have the meaning wrong. This follows from Grice's maxims.

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

Posted Oct 20, 2010 0:05 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

'Proprietary' is a loaded word in the context of talking about open source software and open source companies. He may be a shitty writer and did not think the use through very well, he could be intentionally baiting people hoping that his blog will show up in places like Slashdot as free advertising, or he could just not give a shit that people are not going to take the time to think through what he meant.

You can draw your own conclusions to which one it was. I don't really care a whole lot, either way. I just hope that the comments will not dwell on this word for very much longer.

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

Posted Oct 20, 2010 0:10 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Forget about the use of the word. The problem with his article is interpretation of facts. Consider:

> But the non-proprietary nature of Linux distributions is a myth. Clearly RHEL is a proprietary product, and the whole basis for Red Hats existence as a profit-making corporation whose shares are traded on the stock market is the claim that it can provide a better Linux than the competition. And dont think that the differentiation comes only from services. No, it comes from the code itself. Every major Linux distro differentiates itself by way of thousands of vendor-specific patches whose purpose is to make their distro better than the competitors in ways that will be meaningful to the subset of Linux users who are willing to pay actual money for their bits. Red Hat, Suse and Ubuntu all do it. True, these distros have not yet diverged as radically as the vendor-specific flavors of Unix did in the 1990s. And the fact that these patches are all faithfully GPLd allows Novell and Oracle to support Red Hats version of Linux as well as their own. But this doesnt change the fact that these distros embody competitive differentiation strategies that are no different in kind from those embodied in traditional closed source software such as Oracles 11g database or Microsoft Windows.

I'll bet $5 Jeff is not a Fedora, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu or SuSE contributor. If he was, he would know a bit more about the process.

Each of these distros wants to achieve something. In order to do this, they assemble their distribution differently. They use different options to compile things, they use patches to upstream source to enable things that are needed to make the distribution function in a more integrated way. They use different packaging software and different packaging strategies. And it's not because they are trying to make it "proprietary" - it's because they, as a group, believe this is a the "right" way to make a distribution. Of course they want to be the best, who doesn't?

Not a lot of this has much to do with the value of Red Hat. Does anyone seriously believe that Red Hat are making their money just because they have selected some patches others didn't? Sure, people liked Red Hat Linux because it was assembled in a certain way, but that is not why businesses are paying Red Hat for RHEL. They pay for it because they know that what they installed today will be supported for a number of years, so that the software running on it won't be left with a security ridden base and with no hardware upgrade path.

In the past decade I have worked for companies and government that use Red Hat for precisely the above. Some of them also used Novell for the same thing.

If a company emerges that is willing to put as much support resources behind RHEL as Red Hat, they can be just as successful. Now, this would involve a new Fedora for them as well. Where is Oracle's Fedora?

I can tell you that I have dealt with Red Hat folks when fixing critical pieces of software my employer runs. I heard of these folks on Fedora lists. They are the same guys that hammer out new packages of the same stuff in Fedora. I trust them to do the right thing, because I've seen them in action there.

I have heard of some Oracle kernel folks, but when it comes to the rest of the stuff, I have no idea who's doing the heavy lifting of maintenance of packages for them. Actually, I do - it's Red Hat folks! :-)

So, back to the original point of "proprietary". The use of the word is not important. The implication of it that Red Hat are successful because they make certain changes and now nobody else can play there is false. Red Hat are _the_ player because they do a great job. When others put their nuts on the chopping block like Red Hat did, they will reap similar rewards.

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

Posted Oct 19, 2010 22:50 UTC (Tue) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] (4 responses)

Wow, you really know how to attack a whole group of people without knowing much about them. If you believe that you have used the word proprietary in a common way, could you please give some reference to back that up. Webster does not seem to hint at any definition of the kind that you claim. Here are their two definitions that might apply to software:

1 : one that possesses, owns, or holds exclusive right to something; specifically : proprietor 1

2 : something that is used, produced, or marketed under exclusive legal right of the inventor or maker; specifically : a drug (as a patent medicine) that is protected by secrecy, patent, or copyright against free competition as to name, product, composition, or process of manufacture

Now, you can use the word proprietary anyway you want, but if your unusual definition of the word is the "main point of your article", than why are you so upset with people here for thinking that you sound like a "shill", or that you are spreading propaganda? Proprietary has a very specific meaning in the software world and you are clearly distorting that meaning in your defense, and yet your are also clearly using the term in the common way to evoke emotional responses.

No I am not going say that we are saints here at LWN, but I think that you will find that we have high standards for the articles which we expect to be linked to from here. Maybe you are not used to this? And perhaps the name calling against you was not called for, but at least it had a point and was related to the perceived criticism of your article. You, however have elevated the name calling to a level which is way beyond what most of us expect here. Perhaps you need a thicker skin to be a reporter, because while the readers here may have poignant attacks, they are rather milder than the general public who might have just called you an "idiot" as you so aptly did here.

To be honest, I think we all expected more professionalism of you, if that is the sort of comment response that you think will make LWN readers more respectful of your articles, it has likely failed miserably.

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

Posted Oct 20, 2010 11:41 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

To be honest, that meaning of 'proprietary' is a common one among 'business leaders', marketers, and similar bottom-feeders. They seem to use it to mean, vaguely, 'somehow better because we have magic brilliant people that nobody else has'. It's plain how this is related to the dictionary definition: it's also plain that it's pretty much entirely useless unless you're trying to market something to a group of people who think that 'proprietary' is in some way a good thing.

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

Posted Oct 24, 2010 1:29 UTC (Sun) by zotz (guest, #26117) [Link]

Indeed...

Dirty Words begins:

"Hey advertisers. You want to sell me something? Well, I know you think when you use words like "proprietary" and "patented" or "patent pending" that it will enhance the image of what you are selling and make it seem more desirable to me. That such words will make me want your goods more and make me want to buy them but I have a little secret for you."

all the best,

drew

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

Posted Oct 21, 2010 20:14 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

"1 : one that possesses, owns, or holds exclusive right to something; specifically : proprietor"

An accurate description of copyright. Linux is copyrighted, therefor linux is proprietary.

Same for Red Hat :-)

Cheers,
Wol

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

Posted Oct 21, 2010 20:27 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

While I know your post was likely meant to be humorous, you are forgetting about the effect of the GPL which effectively makes it no longer an exclusive right, and hence not proprietary despite being copyrighted.

I may own a thing at first, but if I donate it to the public, I no longer own it. Free/Libre software has been donated to the public. In the X/BSD copyright case, it primarily serves to remove liability from the donor. The copyright in the GPL case additionally serves to ensure that it stays public and is not homesteaded. In neither case does the copyright serve to retain exclusive right to the software.

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

Posted Oct 19, 2010 22:51 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

Hm. According to you, how does CentOS work if RHEL is really proprietary software?

(Hint: CentOS is not a RHEL »clone« – it's the same source code Red Hat uses to build RHEL, as released by Red Hat under the GPL and assorted other free-software licenses, but compiled by the CentOS people without the »Red Hat« marks.)

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

Posted Oct 20, 2010 0:14 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

The key thing to remember here is that machine code and human readable source code are just different formats of the same program. Different variations in the program can arise from different configuration choices, but for the most part what you get in a tarball is the same as what you get after it's compiled. It's just that the compiled version is executable directly on hardware.

So the software shipping as tarballs from ftp.redhat.com and into CentOS's CDROMs is, in everything but name and labels only, Redhat ES Linux.

The justification for purchasing Redhat's support contracts is not because of the exclusivity of the features that are in the OS, but because of the exclusivity of the experience and partnerships that Redhat has developed through heavily working with third parties; Everything from government contractors, to independent businesses of all sizes, to proprietary ISVs, to GNU/Xorg/Kernel.org/etc projects.

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

Posted Oct 19, 2010 23:02 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (8 responses)

> RHEL is a body of code that has been carefully and strategically crafted to be different than and, at least in intent, technically superior to other Linux distributions. The fact that the code and the patches are all GPLd makes absolutely no difference to this proprietary intent. And that is not a bad thing. It is on the contrary both a very good thing, and absolutely indispensable to Red Hats ability to survive and thrive as an extremely successful commercial software venture.

When you write stuff like this, you just show that you understand little. Red Hat's strength lies in a simple fact: they were willing to risk properly supporting a Linux distribution and they are very good at it.

How can RHEL be "carefully and strategically crafted" when it's essentially a branch of Fedora? The mind boggles...

From your summary:

> Like Googles Android, it suggests that Linux is beginning to fragment in the same way that Unix did.

Er, sorry, I had a look at kernel.org (I didn't actually - just a rhetorical point) and haven't seen anything changed. Care to share something we don't know?

> 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.

You for real? You can use RHEL without paying on as many machines you like. You can copy it to death. Red Hat won't do anything about it.

What you cannot have is a free RHN account to get updates. That is what you pay for: maintenance and support.

What Oracle did with the kernel recently is something they need to run Oracle DB on top of it better. Good luck to them with that (not sarcastically - I promise).

Most Red Hat customers, however, pay Red Hat for the whole thing to stay essentially the same. Yeah, I know - it may sound stupid to you. But it's not. Red Hat guarantee binary compatibility within the same version of RHEL and security patches for the life of the product. No idea whether you have some software development experience, but it takes quite a bit of effort to backport stuff like this. At the same time, they enable new hardware with this "old" stuff, so if you are a big company, with lots of investment in the software you use, you get to keep it for longer. That's Red Hat's value proposition - maintenance and support of something that otherwise moves too fast.

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

Posted Oct 19, 2010 23:44 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (7 responses)

> How can RHEL be "carefully and strategically crafted" when it's essentially a branch of Fedora?

So a branch cannot be carefully crafted? (and let's not even mention how much money Redhat is pouring into Fedora).

> > Like Googles Android, it suggests that Linux is beginning to fragment in the same way that Unix did.

> Er, sorry, I had a look at kernel.org,...

Breaking news: a lot of people use "Linux" as a shortcut for "GNU/Linux".

> > it does not approve of customers who want to use genuine RHEL without paying for it.

> You for real? You can use RHEL without paying on as many machines you like.

Did you actually read the article or are you just trying to extract sentences from their context to change their meaning?

Are you more generally aware that journalists write papers using a less formal style than man pages?

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

Posted Oct 20, 2010 0:22 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (6 responses)

> So a branch cannot be carefully crafted? (and let's not even mention how much money Redhat is pouring into Fedora).

Jeff wrote:

> "carefully and strategically crafted to be different"

I am a small time Fedora contributor. I can see the process in action. I see no evidence that the above is true in any way, shape or form. Also, I work with RHEL daily. I see no evidence the above is in any way sole source of Red Hat's success.

> Breaking news: a lot of people use "Linux" as a shortcut for "GNU/Linux".

And so what? Jeff presented zero evidence that either the kernel or distributions are fragmenting Linux (any shortcut) in any meaningful way.

The only way forward in open source is for different people to propose different solutions to various problems. That is what selections of patches to various distros and kernels are. Eventually, after years of experience with them, they converge. And they only do so because they are open source. Otherwise, they would stay locked away behind proprietary doors.

> Did you actually read the article or are you just trying to extract sentences from their context to change their meaning?

Yes, I read the article. And no, I'm not changing the meaning of anything.

> Are you more generally aware that journalists write papers using a less formal style than man pages?

Yes, I'm aware that Jeff has no idea what he's talking about. He should get a job as a sysadmin maintaining RHEL machines for a while. Then he may understand the value of it.

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

Posted Oct 20, 2010 9:35 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (5 responses)

> And so what? Jeff presented zero evidence that either the kernel or distributions are fragmenting Linux (any shortcut) in any meaningful way.

Come on, anyone having administered a variety of Linux distributions knows that the toolsets are different. Wait, you even acknowledge that yourself:

> The only way forward in open source is for different people to propose different solutions to various problems.

> Eventually, after years of experience with them, they converge.

For some tools yes, for others not.

> And they only do so because they are open source. Otherwise, they would stay locked away behind proprietary doors.

The original article clearly agreed that "GPL-proprietary" (sorry...) is clearly better for end users and that the fragmentation is not as bad as in the old Unix days.

> Yes, I'm aware that Jeff has no idea what he's talking about.

I think he as a very clear idea of what he's talking about. He might be wrong but he does not look ignorant. Unfortunately he has to use exaggeration and provocation otherwise no one would notice him. Just like anyone else in the same kind of job has to. The effort to completely ignore the journalistic style and see the opinion is not so big, some posters here did it.

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

Posted Oct 20, 2010 10:13 UTC (Wed) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

I think the point that gets forgotten in the flamefests about what "proprietary" means, exactly, is that companies are not exclusively producers, and individual hobbyists (for lack of a better term) are not exclusively consumers, in the Free Software universe.

Of course, this is a crucial difference.

Other than that, the analysis was IMHO actually quite right in its assessment of typical corporate involvement of both Linux producers and consumers.

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

Posted Oct 20, 2010 21:45 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (3 responses)

> For some tools yes, for others not.

Please consider once again the summary:

> Like Googles Android, it suggests that Linux is beginning to fragment in the same way that Unix did.

Beginning to fragment like Unix? The admin tools difference has been there from the start and will be there for a some time (that's the different solutions folks propose to solve similar problems all the time). Almost all of these tools are open source and many times they cross distro lines (e.g. NetworkManager: RH to others, alternatives: Debian to others), So, how exactly is it beginning to fragment like proprietary Unix? Almost nothing was flowing over the lines there. This is just complete fabrication in order to be sensationalist.

> The effort to completely ignore the journalistic style and see the opinion is not so big, some posters here did it.

The issue is that he's calling things proprietary when they are not, misinterpreting what the true value of Red Hat is and concluding that because Oracle applied a few patches on top of a new kernel, Linux (any shortcut) is now fragmenting like proprietary Unix. Facts do not support this. I don't care about his style.

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

Posted Oct 21, 2010 8:17 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] (2 responses)

I think you are missing the article's main points: 1) "enterprise Linux" is perceived and treated by customers as if it were proprietary software and 2) it is entirely possibe to "add value" to a piece of Free Software that effectively locks in customers. Oracle knows exactly how this works, and how little principles about freedom matter in the absence of endless time and resources.

Throwing out a kernel patch does not make "enterprise Linux", so we will have to see what the future brings. So far, there is really nothing new about all this, or the way it is presented.

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

Posted Oct 21, 2010 9:06 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> 1) "enterprise Linux" is perceived and treated by customers as if it were proprietary software and

> 2) it is entirely possibe to "add value" to a piece of Free Software that effectively locks in customers.

Yeah, I get what Jeff is _trying_ to argue. He's saying that there is essentially no big difference between proprietary Oracle/Windows and RHEL. His words:

> But this doesnt change the fact that these distros embody competitive differentiation strategies that are no different in kind from those embodied in traditional closed source software such as Oracles 11g database or Microsoft Windows.

Of course, I disagree with this, because it is fundamentally not true. Differentiation strategies of Oracle/Microsoft are vastly different to that of Red Hat. As was noted before, nobody can just take Oracle's 11g database and build support business around it. Nobody can patch it or improve it. It's not open source. Ditto Windows. So, Oracle/Microsoft clearly differentiate from others as the only possible source for that DB/OS. Red Hat does not. Not even RHEL (case in point: Oracle).

However, open source in itself doesn't guarantee anything to a business except some free raw materials. Running a successful business is no easy thing. What Jeff sees as proprietary model is just a business doing it's job right, so competitors are few and far between. And Jeff's fantasies that open source fanboys think that open source somehow cannot mean strong and ruthless business is just that - fantasies.

I have no idea what Jeff would have Red Hat do. Have them certify a non-existent "common" Linux distro against some software? Have them provide training for that same non-existent "common" distro? I mean, seriously. Red Hat's brand is proprietary, yes. Well, thanks Jeff, we didn't notice this before.

In terms of competition, if Canonical were serious about what they do, they could threaten Red Hat significantly. So could Novell. The first lot are less about you bread-and-butter computer room stuff. The second lot are kind of a hybrid between open source and proprietary software and seem to be struggling financially.

And now comes Oracle. As you say:

> Oracle knows exactly how this works, and how little principles about freedom matter in the absence of endless time and resources.

Well, it's not really about what they think about freedom. If they want to support an open source distro, they have to be embedded in the community. If they are not, their distro will be just like OpenSolaris - open source on paper and in the corridors of the company. A lot of Red Hat guys are the real, "old" open source hackers. If Oracle wants to do it right, they have to either snatch some of those or groom their own.

That, IMHO, will be the real make-or-break of Oracle enterprise Linux. And it's not because of some moral superiority they'd get by paying open source folks. No. It's because they would then live and breathe that stuff, just like Red Hat folks do.

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

Posted Oct 21, 2010 17:56 UTC (Thu) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

"1) "enterprise Linux" is perceived and treated by customers as if it were proprietary software"

If that's what the author wanted to say he should have said it in so many words. Said that way no one is interested since this isn't news (or even insightful). It's still flamebait because being treated as proprietary by some customers does not make RHEL proprietary.

"2) it is entirely possibe to "add value" to a piece of Free Software that effectively locks in customers"

Until the GPL'd patch is merged in to your competitor's distribution. If Oracle patches are not merged into RHEL or even mainline then they're optimizations that most people don't want. You could say that Oracle will keep making changes to the kernel that will always be rejected from mainline for one reason or another and that improve the performance of their DB, but if customers start leaving Red Hat because of this you can bet that RH will produce an Oraclized kernel in short order.

Vendor lock in only happens with GPL'd software when there isn't enough market for a competitor.

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

Posted Oct 19, 2010 23:57 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

A couple things you need to understand about Redhat is that any exclusivity of their code is NOT the key for their success. It's their methodology and their willingness to work with anybody and everybody and their willingness to share and abandon exclusive features to the whole community is what makes them successful; relatively to the hundreds of other Linux companies that have tried to do the same.

They aggressively work with upstream developers and will often make sure that the improvements they ship are widely available to many different distributions and corporations well in advance to Redhat shipping anything. KVM, improvements to GCC, driver enhancements to the kernel, performance improvements, usability improvements, security improvements. Redhat developers a lot of features that end up in other distributions for a long time before they ever end up in Redhat's shipping product. Not always, but this is often the case.

This is what makes Linux's 'fragmentation' different from Unix. With Unix it was fragmented because of restrictions placed on use. Those optimizations and proprietary features are associated with very high costs. With Linux it's only fragmented because people are optimizing, each in their own way, to fill nitches and functionality that is unique for their own situations and desires. So-called 'proprietary features' have no cost associated with them other then the work you have to put into implementing them (which is very low because all the code is already written and debugged for you). It's almost all benefits. There is nothing that Redhat ships with their software that cannot be duplicated by anybody else with a little effort.

Oracle should know this better then anybody because Oracle created their own clone called 'Unbreakable Linux' based directly off of software downloaded from ftp.redhat.com. Although they did not do as a good as a job as CentOS does.

Redhat knows that their source code improvements, design choices, and their optimizations need to be done because they benefit their customers. Exclusivity for exclusivity sake has NO benefits for customers at all. Customers don't buy the Redhat OS because that is the only place they can get that OS or those features. (because it very obviously is not true). They buy it because Redhat works hard with a huge number of different people and corporations to provide the best possible software in the best possible way for their customers. Redhat has a large pool of knowledge and the connections and partnerships with all sorts of different industries that their customers find extremely valuable.

Support options, ISV certifications, government validations and certifications, approval processes in large corporations, hardware vendor support, etc etc. Willingness to work with all the GNU/FSF/Kernel.org/GCC/etc type folks in the world, on terms favorable and preferred to everybody involved. Those partnerships and relationships and the depth and breadth of knowledge that Redhat has about it's own OS and it's own code base is what is valuable. No body else offers that sort of value in a OS; short of Microsoft, and Microsoft's costs are exponentially higher then Redhat's.

Redhat does not 'tolerate' other people using their code... Redhat benefits heavily from the independent developers and other projects that use that code for different purposes. Projects like CentOS benefit Redhat because customers can use CentOS to keep deployment costs low without raising the cost of supporting those customers one bit. They can pick and choose and pay Redhat based on the value that Redhat's services and support can get them. This way customers can have the highest level of utility from the money that Redhat receives from them. This is true with almost all the software that Redhat ships.

To put it another way: There is no reason to pay Redhat money besides the fact that subscribing to Redhat's support contracts will improve your own organization and lower costs. If you want the features that Redhat offers then you do not have to pay a dime.

This is why Oracle will fail and will keep on failing if they think they can just make their own highly optimized version of Linux and think people will buy into that. It's just plain wrong-headed thinking.

The stuff your talking about has been tried many different times by many different Linux companies and it always is going to lead to higher development costs, longer development timelines, and less stable software. Oracle will have higher development costs and the complexity and size of the QA process necessary to compete with Redhat will be something that Redhat themselves do not have to deal with. Redhat thrives because they have been able to avoid that trap and have been willing to abandon exclusivity of code and OS features as a reason for people to pay them money.

Right now Linux is a highly optimized and mature server platform. There is very very little that Oracle can do that will make their special Linux version perform in ways that cannot be duplicated by anybody running Redhat, Debian, Ubuntu, or anything else. If Oracle can produce a packaged product that is easy to use and is cheaper then running Redhat on a Dell or other vendor, then sure they can make some money. But Oracle's track record is not hot in those regards.

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

Posted Oct 20, 2010 0:55 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Your post nicely explains why Red Hat are good at what they do. They have a lot of guys that know their shit on the payroll. And these are essentially the guys eventually providing support. They beat the shit out of most proprietary support.

Which reminds me of a case of a proprietary software I had to support, which was segfaulting on bad data. Three months into giving dumps to the bunch of idiots their support people were, they changed the team, only to tell me that segfaults were being caused by "load" - the exact same explanation the first lot tried in the beginning.

No self respecting Red Hat engineer would ever try nonsense like this, given their public profile in the community.

This is something Jeff probably cannot comprehend.

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

Posted Oct 20, 2010 1:22 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (4 responses)

> differentiated with a view to achieving competitive advantage in the market (and possible some degree of customer lock-in)

Here is the question you need to answer: would Red Hat be just as successful should they drop their super-secret and carefully crafted development effort (Fedora) in the future and join (for instance) Debian with all of the resources and then build RHEL from it?

My answer to this question is: yes, of course. Yours appears to be no, given the article you've written. Or do you care to revise that?

PS. That "super-secret and carefully crafted" above made me chuckle. I mean the whole thing is so "strategic" that they let idiots like myself have complete visibility of it :-)

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

Posted Oct 20, 2010 16:41 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link] (3 responses)

Clearly wrong...

If you mess around with the sources for Fedora, or take a bunch of open bugs against Fedora and look at their evolution, it is quite often that they cite Debian as the source of fixes, or some other distribution, or somebody upstream. So in a very real sense Red Hat is using Debian as their "soopersekrit carefully crafted development effort" to its fullest. Yep, it's called "open source" for something ;-)

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

Posted Oct 20, 2010 21:13 UTC (Wed) by sgros (guest, #36440) [Link] (1 responses)

This is interesting. You imply that Fedora uses Debian as its primary upstream, or as one of its upstreams?

Next interesting thing, you poked a bit around, got some impression, and made a strong claim from it?

My point is, Fedora's policy is to work with upstream as close as possible. That make the claim of taking the fixes from upstream (even though, how you can "get fixes from upstream" when you _take_ upstream?!)? But how can you claim for Debian without backing it with some concrete numbers?

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

Posted Oct 25, 2010 3:20 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link]

No, I'm not saying Debian (specifically) is "the" upstream. It is upstream for some stuff (and in turn Fedora is Debian's upstream for others). Fixes are passed around among distributions, are even upstreamed agressively by some. Sometimes the upstream developers are the packagers for a distribution, there are cases of people packaging for several distributions.

That was what I meant. Sorry if it didn't come out clearly.

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

Posted Oct 20, 2010 22:42 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

I also didn't quite understand what you were trying to say here. I am well aware that Red Hat use fixes developed for Debian from time to time. The reverse is also true. This in itself actually neatly disproves Jeff's fragmentation fantasy, otherwise patches would not be applicable.

My point was slightly different when it comes to the strategic, carefully crafted (I added super-secret myself - that's how one usually goes about it) implication Jeff is proposing. Consider this part of his comment:

> RHEL is a body of code that has been carefully and strategically crafted to be different than and, at least in intent, technically superior to other Linux distributions.

The implication is that Red Hat are carefully subverting the regular Linux (distribution - this doesn't even exist BTW) to change, in order to achieve differentiation, which is supposedly the source of some sort of superiority. Now, if they are really trying to do that, they are doing a really shit job, IMHO. I can see _daily_ what they are doing, down to the last patch:

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/
http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/

And I'm a nobody, a lowly grunt.

So, Jeff's theory of "carefully and strategically crafted" development effort to achieve some kind of differentiation or superiority is a myth. If it wasn't, Red Hat would be doing it behind closed doors.

In fact, quite the opposite is true. They actually understand that unless they do it in the open (given it's open source), they will lose their hard earned position in the community. Furthermore, changes are explicitly "approved" by that same community through releases called Fedora. Anyone from that same community willing to put enough effort into changing the strategy or direction can attempt to do so, in the open.

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

Posted Oct 20, 2010 5:23 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

"But to someone who is keen on having the utmost strength in factual accuracy, allow me to mention that you have completely gone weak in your understanding of the point I was making, nonetheless stated in plain English, namely that for Ellison to accuse Red Hat of being four years behind in its updates only a short time before the official launch of RHEL 6 is particularly unfair."

When you fix up your "admittedly garbled account" and misuse of a technical term to mean something else, maybe you can improve others understanding of what you were talking about. I would also suggesting that you don't use the word "proprietary" because it is a very loaded word considering the audience that will read your article. If you are keen on fixing up the article so that it uses the words accurately, we will have the time to reflect on the improved article. My understanding is just fine. Thank you very much.

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

Posted Oct 20, 2010 17:44 UTC (Wed) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link]

Im not using the word proprietary in the lawyers sense of intellectual property rights (though some of those are involved), but in the ordinary language sense of differentiated with a view to achieving competitive advantage in the market (and possible some degree of customer lock-in)

Except that is not the ordinary language sense of "proprietary" at all, which is rather "Of or relating to an owner or ownership".

If it is not your property, it is not proprietary. If it is your property and you let anyone use it as if it weren't, it isn't proprietary either, but something much more closely resembling the public domain, which is about as far from proprietary as you can get.

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

Posted Oct 20, 2010 20:03 UTC (Wed) by salvarsan (guest, #18257) [Link] (1 responses)

Hmm, that propaganda dig struck a nerve.

Someone else might be impressed with the quod libetic verbiage expended in your rebuttal.

You narrowly framed the issue in politico-economic terms, and ignored the political significance of kernel.org.

Public land is no less public despite having a licensed brand name concession stand on it.

Your screed tacitly assumes that Linux belongs primarily to Red Hat and Oracle when, if fact, their putative appropriation of Linux is little different from that by Montevista or Timesys or any other specialized release, since they ALL start from a distribution got from kernel.org.

Is any kernel.org release considered proprietary? Or commercial?
Only by sophistic acrobatics.

RHEL and the maintenance thereof is a private service based on a public resource. While it may be narrowly technically correct to call some aspect of RHEL proprietary, it is neither generally nor usefully correct.

Calling a tail a leg does not make it into one.

Therefore, I see your authorial excesses as propaganda when not simply inflammatory. I stipulate that you may not be in Oracle's pocket, Mr. Gould, but it is evidently in your financial interest to write the overstated and alarmist material that you do.

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

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

Just to bolster this point. When Sun's president brought this up in 2004 part of the rebuttal against the charge is this salient quote from a certain L. Torvalds (man on the street and alleged expert on the linux kernel)

"Sure, RH definitely has their own vendor kernel, but its not proprietary, and a number of the top Linux kernel contributors are Red Hat employees," Torvalds said.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Sun-Sticks...

This is very well trod rhetorically ground. Nothing has really changed in those intervening 6 years...except the name of Red Hat's competition in the market place.

-jef

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

Posted Oct 21, 2010 0:58 UTC (Thu) by motk (subscriber, #51120) [Link]

[Incomprehensible whhaargbl]

Well, you got advertising hits, and that's the main thing I guess.

They never learn

Posted Oct 21, 2010 4:05 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

Dan Lyons went through this exact same stage, before finally admitting he was wrong.

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

Posted Oct 21, 2010 15:35 UTC (Thu) by pyellman (guest, #4997) [Link]

Mr. Gould:

I have been paying fairly close attention to open source software development (as software and as a movement or phenomenon) for something approaching 2 decades, and I have rarely known the term "proprietary" to be used the way you define it, whether in a commercial or open source context, with a single categorical exception: by senior executives or leaders of major software firms, or their mouthpieces, in an attempt to obfuscate or minimize the differences between their offerings and a perceived competitor's offerings, or more recently and commonly, to obfuscate any perceived benefits to open source software.

Examples of people who have gone to great lengths to attempt to redefine the term proprietary, as well as other terms crucial to the identity and benefits of open source software, include Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates, Scott McNealy, and of course, Larry Ellison. Usually (uh, actually, always), these re-definitions of key open source terms or concepts are crafted in a way as to render the term meaningless as a way of distinguishing between two or more options. Your re-definition of "proprietary" does exactly that. I assure you that the vast majority of informed people would agree that to be proprietary there must be meaningful constraints on the reproduction of a product that go beyond the mere manual effort required to replicate some small portion of the total work that went into the creation of that final product. In this context such constraints include legal constraints, obfuscation, and limitations on the availability of the source code.

Given the above, you should not be surprised that you may be accused of serving as a shill for Oracle or Larry Ellision, even if that was not your intent. Either way, this element of your piece draws into serious question your qualifications as a Tech Analyst, your analytical capabilities, your objectivity, or any combination thereof.