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

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

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.

Mr. Gould, if you would like to convince anyone that the substantial similarities between Microsoft and Red Hat make them publicly-traded software companies of the same kind, different only in negligible detail, you have only to point to the freely-downloadable sources for Windows or Office and give examples of companies actually using those sources to build a competing product.

Until then, you might as convincingly have written

But this doesn't change the fact that these "human" tribes employ competitive differentiation strategies that are no different in kind from those employed by traditional chimpanzee tribes such as the Ookook and Mugghwump.

I'd like to think I don't have to point out the difference between "embody" and "employ", nor that we're all human here.

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What rankles is really just that one word “proprietary”

"Proprietary" isn't even on my list. "Fig leaf" and "pretend" and "myth" and "camouflage" and "hypocrisy" and "propaganda" and "suggests" are.

I don't want to speak for anyone else, but it seems to me much of the heat in the responses comes from an unwillingness to ascribe your failure to respect obvious and relevant facts in print to any personal inability to identify them at all.

From now on Oracle will work on a faster update schedule than Red Hat or Suse, cherry picking new features it likes from the upstream Linux community or — when it doesn’t find what it wants — creating its own. It will be up to the community (i.e. Linus and friends) and the other distributors to decide when or whether they want to accept Oracle’s contributions.

For instance, here you've described a perfectly good motive and method for starting a new distro. Oracle say they think they can do better, for their purposes, than to just use Red Hat or anything else. So they're doing it, because they can.

The most salient of the relevant observations you neglected to make here is that making sure what Oracle is doing is possible is the entire point of the GPL.