Oracle Makes Red Hat Kernel Changes Available As Broken-Out Patches 104
Artefacto writes "The Ksplice team has made available a git repository with the changes Red Hat made to the kernel broken down. They are calling this project RedPatch. This comes in response to a policy change Red Hat had implemented in early 2011, with the goal of undercutting Oracle and other vendors' strategy of poaching Red Hat's customers. The Ksplice team says they've been working on these individual patches since then. They claim to be now making it public because they 'feel everyone in the Linux community can benefit from the work.' 'For Ksplice, we build individual updates for each change and rely on source patches that are broken-out, not a giant tarball. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to take the right patches to create individual updates for each fix, and to skip over the noise — like a change that speeds up bootup — which is unnecessary for an already-running system.'"
If it wasn't for Oracle Unbreakable Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Now waiting for Red Hat to (Score:4, Insightful)
release patches that upgrades Oracle 9 to 11.
Re:Gift horse = Mouth (Score:2, Insightful)
It is free. .. unless you didn't buy that Oracle RDBMS license?
Re:Gift horse = Mouth (Score:4, Insightful)
I have 0% problem with the patches - but 100% problem with the dishonesty motivating the effort and the lack of transparency behind it.
Re:Gift horse = Mouth (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't claim to be doing it out of altruism. They quite clearly say they are doing it for their own benefit.
Re:If it wasn't for Oracle Unbreakable Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
MySQL (Score:3, Insightful)
Would be nice if Oracle would break out their MySQL patches.
Oracle greed that eventually will kill Linux (Score:0, Insightful)
It's a matter of simple economics. A long story, short: RH is developing some of the Open Source wares out there but they have to pay for this work, they have to pay for the QA that they are doing on the products so they sell support for RHEL.I'd say perfectly acceptable, given that they return something to the community. Oracle says, why pay RH for RHEL when all is Open Source anyway ? We better get what RH is doing, for free, change the label, sell our support and make some easy money. Perfectly legal and acceptable in a capitalistic world. Now, if whoever made that decision would have seen past their tiny noses, they would have realized that doing exactly that would undermine RH's ability to develop and implicitly the quality of the OS that they take and resell .... Sounds like shooting themselves in the foot ? And everybody else using Linux commercially around them ? Looking at the numbers widely available on the Internet, you will see that RH has a 13 % contribution to the kernel while Oracle a mere 2 %, we can probably extend safely the same numbers for other products in the RHEL etc.. Who should we trust for giving us a better commercially supported OS ? I am not a conspiracy theory guy but wouldn't linux disappearance (exagerated !) offer direct benefit to... Solaris ... which is owned by Oracle ..... Hmmmm !?
Re:Gift horse = Mouth (Score:4, Insightful)
Who cares? It's a free source of individual patches. Enjoy it while it lasts.
That sort of attitude is incredibly short sited.
Red Hat have contributed a HUGE amount to the open source community over the years. If they were pushed under by Oracle taking all their work and selling it at half the price (this is effectively what Oracle do) then these patches will dry up forever and Linux will lose its largest and most open source friendly commercial distributor. At that point Oracle may well pick up the majority market for commercially supported Linux and they will be far worse to the open source community than Red hat are.