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

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 Hat’s 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 don’t 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 GPL’d allows Novell and Oracle to support Red Hat’s version of Linux as well as their own. But this doesn’t 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 Oracle’s 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.