they will lose some customers over this [LWN.net]

they will lose some customers over this

Posted Mar 1, 2011 2:15 UTC (Tue) by brouhaha (guest, #1698)
Parent article: Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

I've been considering buying RHEL 6 licenses for my servers, which currently run Fedora. I like Fedora but would prefer RHEL for longer-term stability. However, I have on multiple occasions had to debug kernels by rebuilding from RPMs with some patches disabled. The way past RHEL kernel RPMs worked (and Fedora kernel RPMS) made this very easy. I'm unwilling to switch to a distribution that flattens the patches into their distributed kernel sources, even if they have provided some separate mechanism for customers to get access to the individual patches.

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they will lose some customers over this

Posted Mar 1, 2011 2:37 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)

You'd be in a much stronger position to argue the point if you were already a paying customer and you cancelled your subscriptions because of this policy change. Existing customers have the most leverage in influencing strategic business decisions for any for-profit business.

Those of us who are not paying customers(and I am not a paying Red Hat customer) can still have impact if we engage in reasoned debate on the merits of a policy and the actual harm it is causing to the ecosystem. As a Fedora community member and Fedora user this particular policy change does not directly nor does it indirectly impact me, so I don't have an authoritative voice in challenging the policy. The kernel in question is effectively dead to me. As a CentOS user it matters somewhat more, but I'm not yet sure how much more yet.

But what seldom works in coercing any business into changing its policy, is to suggest that you were thinking about being a customer and now you have been turned off because of a policy change. Even if its true, you haven't risked anything by saying it and you haven't guaranteed them any income if they revert the policy. Since you weren't a customer before the policy change there's no reasonable expectation that reverting the policy will in fact make you a new customer.

-jef

So true...

Posted Mar 1, 2011 6:47 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Yup - that's exactly right. Business people are monitoring these things, you know. When such "stupid change" are introduced there are lots of talks about how "I will not support them because of X", but then adoption rate shows that very few people actually care.

When people really do care (think SONY's rootkit fiasco, for example) companies backpedal furiously. But I doubt it's the case here: people who are build the RHEL subscriptions and people who are hacking kernel in the same organizations are usually just totally different people so I doubt this change will affect adoption rate all that much.