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 20, 2010 1:22 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
In reply to: Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore by ITAnalyst
Parent article: Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

> 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 :-)

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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.