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 10:30 UTC (Wed) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935)
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

> The barriers that protect it from competition are lower than those shielding Oracle, Microsoft, et al., but they are real nonetheless and carefully cultivated by Red Hat.

This looks to me like a second definition of proprietary.

The first one you gave was akin to the normal English word "custom": improved to satisfy better the need of someone (database users for Oracle Linux, customers who want stability for a long period of time for RHEL, etc.).

Now, you say Red Hat's Linux is proprietary because Red Hat has competitive advantage in supporting it: it provides training, it has partnerships that help certifying RHEL for various uses, it shows their corpus of resolved support cases to customers only, etc. However, this does not mean that RHEL is proprietary software. It means that some of the "added values" of the subscription are proprietary to Red Hat and cannot be cloned.

However, it does not make the software any less free. In fact, of those added values, the ones that are directly related to source code (e.g. security fixes and hardware enablement) are immediately available to CentOS users as well.

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

Posted Oct 20, 2010 10:44 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

To me it looks like Jeff is trying to claim that a neighbourhood baker that has given his recipe away and the list of his suppliers is baking proprietary bread, because most customers prefer him for deliveries on time, cleanliness, best service etc. Well, yeah - the guy is the proprietor of his business - that's for sure. That doesn't mean he should be helping his competitors run theirs. But the bread is not proprietary for sure.