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

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.