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

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