

Red Hat's response to the "obfuscated" source code accusations - TomasSedovic
http://press.redhat.com/2011/03/04/commitment-to-open/

======
naner
Here's the meat since 80% of the article is PR blabbering and we all already
know who Red Hat is:

 _When we released RHEL 6 approximately four months ago, we changed the
release of the kernel package to have all our patches pre-applied. Why did we
make this change? To speak bluntly, the competitive landscape has changed. Our
competitors in the Enterprise Linux market have changed their commercial
approach from building and competing on their own customized Linux
distributions, to one where they directly approach our customers offering to
support RHEL.

Frankly, our response is to compete. Essential knowledge that our customers
have relied on to support their RHEL environments will increasingly only be
available under subscription. The itemization of kernel patches that correlate
with articles in our knowledge base is no longer available to our competitors,
but rather only to our customers who have recognized the value of RHEL and
have thus indirectly funded Red Hat’s contributions to open source that will
advance their business now and in the future._

TL;DR: Competition is hard, especially when we are "open" and everyone else is
not, so we adopted our competitors' tactics.

~~~
burgerbrain
_"we adopted our competitors' tactics."_

No, Red Hat develops software, Oracle mooches off Red Hat's work. They have
made this change to ensure that they can stay in business, which is important
because unlike Oracle, they _actually do work_ on the software they ship.

They can't adopt Oracle's tactics because there is nobody else doing what Red
Hat does.

~~~
mapleoin
_They can't adopt Oracle's tactics because there is nobody else doing what Red
Hat does._

SUSE does what Red Hat does (work on the software it ships). In addition to
that it also provides Enterprise Support for RHEL :). Which might make it both
good and evil you could say or maybe just _chameleonic_.

~~~
burgerbrain
Not to anywhere even close to approaching Red Hat's extend, and RHEL certainly
isn't just repackaging SLES so my point remains.

~~~
munchhausen
> Not to anywhere even close to approaching Red Hat's extend

This needs a citation.

I for one do not agree with you. Looking at the statistics of top kernel
contributors for kernel 2.6.35 by lines changed¹, Red Hat can claim 7.8% of
lines changed while Novell (SuSE) is at 4.7%. The difference is considerable
but I do not think it's fair to say that that it's "Not to anywhere even close
to approaching Red Hat's extend[sic]".

These statistics obviously cover just the kernel. The Linux environment is
much larger than that, and it should be pointed out that SuSE is _the_ major
contributor to KDE with openSUSE being generally regarded as the top-of-the-
line KDE distribution. Novell also contributes significantly to GNOME.

I do not want to turn this comment into a laundry list of SuSE contributions
to Linux, so I'll just say that IMO SuSE are certainly holding their own as
the 2nd largest enterprise Linux vendor in terms of contribution to the
general Linux ecosystem. If you do not agree, I would appreciate it if you
could back your opinion with substantial evidence as opposed to just making
unsubstantiated claims.

¹ <http://lwn.net/Articles/395961/>

~~~
krakensden
I was under the impression that Novell no longer works on Gnome much, and that
the torch (and many of the engineers) have moved on to Red Hat and some
smaller companies (Igalia, etc).

------
TomasSedovic
I'm posting this to add a continuation to the story about Red Hat having
changed the way they release their RHEL 6 kernel:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2272535>

and

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2283188>

 _If anyone actually cares about this: disclaimer -- I work for Red Hat. Not
on RHEL._

------
marshray
Props to Red Hat for not putting out a bunch of BS pretending like it's not
really what it really is.

~~~
yuhong
It is not enough to be PR 2.0 compliant, which requires ending of control over
the message, but it does ensure that adoption is much easier.

------
aphexairlines
Here's why Red Hat has to do this:

[http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto041820061...](http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto041820061306424713)

Financial Times: Is open source going to be disruptive to Oracle?

Larry Ellison: No. If an open source product gets good enough, we'll simply
take it. Take [the web server software] Apache: once Apache got better than
our own web server, we threw it away and took Apache. So the great thing about
open source is nobody owns it – a company like Oracle is free to take it for
nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that's what
we'll do.

~~~
rfugger
And as open source slowly eats into their proprietary products, they have less
and less to differentiate themselves from any other software company, and it
becomes harder to lock customers in to their platform.

~~~
pyre
Oracle will have plenty to differentiate themselves from 'any other software
company.' Even if all they are offering is support, they are a trusted brand
name among middle-management.

------
originalgeek
I'm unsure what the benefit to Red Hat is in this case. All a competitor need
do is become a "customer" by buying a copy of RHEL 6, and then Red Hat is
compelled by the GPL to distribute all of their patches to that "customer".
Seems like more of a PR gaffe to me, than an effective countermeasure against
the competition gaining access to their code.

~~~
wmf
I think this was discussed on LWN; if you get the patches from Red Hat and
redistribute them, Red Hat will cancel your service contract. So it could
work, but only once.

~~~
originalgeek
Thanks, I don't keep up on LWN. It seems to me then, that Red Hat has created
their own fork of the kernel. Am I overreacting?

~~~
wmf
That has been going on forever. I remember the days when Red Hat was shipping
a "2.4" kernel that had all the features from 2.6 backported into it. They're
still submitting the patches upstream, so if you want an "unobfuscated" kernel
tree you can get it from Linus.

------
sagarun
There is nothing wrong in what Red Hat did. I _heard_ that some customers
indeed bought oracle's unbreakable Linux, but switched back to RHEL after
experiencing oracle's crappy support.

The wonderful thing about Free and open source software is _support_ being not
a monopoly. You don't have to depend on one person. Oracle's offering will
make RHEL and its support team much better and competitive.

------
flyt
This PR statement unfortunately fails to address the knock-on effects to the
CentOS project that this will have.

~~~
nas
CentOS doesn't give a shit, they just build the rpm. This is meant to
frustrate outfits like Oracle, where they mix and match patches to produce a
Red Hat+ kernel (a least, so Red Hat feels).

The thing is, Red Hat is free to grab Oracles changes and incorporate them
back. Tit for tat and all that. This policy change surely must have come from
upper management. Real programmers know it is no serious problem for Oracle,
only an annoyance for everyone else. It is also very much against the spirit
of the GPL.

I respect Red Hat for all the open source work they do but this change is
lame. Piss a bunch of your most loyal customers and advocates off for no real
gain. Sounds like a great plan.

~~~
SwellJoe
"Red Hat is free to grab Oracles changes and incorporate them back."

Oracle does jack shit for Open Source software, including the Linux kernel.
There is nothing useful for Red Hat to incorporate back from the Oracle
kernels.

This is clearly a move to counter Oracle, and I can't blame them. Oracle has
more money than god, and a willingness to do anything to win. They're
rebuilding RHEL, rebranding it, and extracting money from their sizable
corporate userbase for it...money that probably ought to be going to the folks
who actually built the distribution, and the people who build the underlying
software (Red Hat contributes more to Linux and Open Source than any company
of its size, by a significant margin; Oracle contributes effectively nothing,
in comparison).

That may be changing...Oracle has hired on at least a couple of reasonably
well-known kernel developers (Chris Mason, for one). But, for now, Oracle is
leveraging the development work of Red Hat far more than Red Hat could
possibly leverage anything out of Oracle. Oracle just isn't a team player in
this regard, and it's not built into their culture to become a team player, as
far as I can tell.

~~~
nas
I don't follow the logic. If Oracle does "jack shit" then how how does this
monolithic patch inconvenience them in any great way? Also, with their money
I'm sure they can find a way to split apart the patch again (either via Red
Hat's web interface or by brute force). I guess I'm not management material
because this move makes no sense.

~~~
SwellJoe
Most of the value in question is in the information about the patches, and not
the patches themselves. The explanation from Red Hat makes it clear they'll be
closing up quite a bit of their back and forth discussions with customers
about the bugs they fix and such (which I have a bit more of a problem with,
actually; if a bug tracker isn't open to everyone, it's value decreases
remarkably, including to the paying customers who are using it).

Oracle can certainly deal with it. Many problems are solvable with sufficient
money. I just think Red Hat is trying to make it more expensive for Oracle to
rebuild/rebrand RHEL while still remaining dedicated to supporting the
upstream. I don't know if this is the best way to achieve that end. But, I
have a great deal of mistrust for Oracle, while I feel pretty good about Red
Hat. Oracle's handling of MySQL is not making me feel better about them,
either, while we're on the subject.

~~~
dedward
(which I have a bit more of a problem with, actually; if a bug tracker isn't
open to everyone, it's value decreases remarkably, including to the paying
customers who are using it).

It helps RedHat focus on the bugs their customers care about -vs- bugs non-
customers care about.

~~~
pyre
True, but you also don't get outside feedback/comments/help. You only get the
paying customer(s) with the issue and RedHat developers.

------
joe_the_user
Red Hat:"Essential knowledge that our customers have relied on to support
their RHEL environments _will increasingly only be available under
subscription._ "

FSF: "the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to
share and _change_ all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free
software for _all its user_ "

However necessary Red Hat might consider this move to be, it is just as
clearly a move away from the spirit of the GPL however much it may conform to
the letter of the GPL.

At the same time, open source companies need to compete on some basis and
hiding information seems to be one basis. Is there an alternative to this?
(serious question)

~~~
mapleoin
You have all of the freedom to change the code that you always had. The code
is exactly the same, but instead of being released in small chunks, it's
released in one big tarball. The commit splitting and commit messages could be
considered documentation, they are not part of the code and not covered by any
license.

------
chris_j
Anyone else see this?

"redhat.com is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later."

I was starting to wonder if the controversy surrounding this had taken their
site down but the article is still there, a few screens down.

------
dasht
Sustaining an artificial scarcity of high quality integrated OS releases has
been what RHAT has been about since the beginning. Why is this new move any
surprise?

~~~
mapleoin
I wonder which of Red Hat's actions make you think that they're trying to
create an _artificial_ scarcity. There are hundreds of other ditros. How does
Red Hat keep them from creating a quality product?

~~~
dasht
By not sharing software work that is easily shared. They love to draw from
upstream but they share only those parts of their infrastructure that don't
threaten scarcity.

~~~
pyre
Why not list actual complaints? So far you've just been making
generalizations. What software are they not sharing? Are they violating the
GPL?

------
simplon
The site seems to be down..

------
Getahobby
Hmm, sounds like Redhat is really looking for a BSD type license.

------
jwcacces
And that's how you make yourself irrelevant....

------
asdfor
TL;DR: We found a loophole on the license, we are going to abuse it , Problem
??? :trollface:

------
xilun0
> Red Hat often talks about upstream first, the practice of openly developing
> kernel features and bug fixes as part of the most recent upstream kernel
> before we ship them in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We know the value of
> getting code open from day one, debating it in the public forum, and letting
> it mature through a cycle long before it reaches our customers’ data
> centers. As the kernel community is well aware, it is standard practice for
> Red Hat to submit fixes that we find in supporting our customers.

[...]

> Why did we make this change? To speak bluntly, the competitive landscape has
> changed.

[...]

> but rather only to our customers who have recognized the value of RHEL and
> have thus indirectly funded Red Hat’s contributions to open source that will
> advance their business now and in the future.

Translation : RH believes in the shared source model as initiated by MS, and
not in the free software model were knowledge is valuable and should not be
hidden, and were new advanced are done on the shoulders on giants.

From now on, I consider RH as a traitor for the free software community, and
will handle it like that (unless they change their unacceptable behaviour)

~~~
sigzero
You are a bad translator and your attitude is perplexing. RH is conforming
100% to the GPL.

