Red Hat Nears $1 Billion In Revenues, Closing Door On Clones 201
darthcamaro writes "Red Hat is almost at its goal of being the first pure-play open source vendor to hit $1 billion in Revenues. Red Hat reported its fiscal 2011 revenues this week which hit $909 million. Going forward, Red Hat has already taken steps to protect its business by changing the way it packages the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 kernel, making it harder for Oracle to clone. 'We are the top commercial contributor to most of the components of the Linux kernel and we think we have a lot of value and we want to make sure that, that value is recognized,' Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said. 'In terms of competition, I don't think we necessarily saw anything different from before but I'd say better to close the barn door before the horses leave than afterwards.'"
Clones around, it's "enhanced clones" with trouble (Score:5, Informative)
CentOS and Scientific Linux are still workable, it's the "enhanced clones" like Oracle and Novell that are cherrypicking RHEL's best customers and not giving back to the open source community with development in open source filesystems, X, authentication, and genuine hardware support that are messing up the business.
It's just too bad CentOS has lost its way with one of its developers, Johnny Hughes, telling people to not let the door hit them in the ass on the way out if they don't like how late everything is and then ignoring attempts to help. I just switched to Scientific Linux and and am quite happy.
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Suse is as different from RHEL as debian is. Yes, they both use rpms. Th
Re:Clones around, it's "enhanced clones" with trou (Score:4, Interesting)
Take a look at Novell's "RHEL support" offering. It's turned out to be complete crap, repackaging RHEL packages and alleging to offer one-stop support for SuSE customers, and blaming any problems on RHEL to convince customers to switch to SuSE.
http://www.novell.com/promo/suse/free-30days-expanded-support.html
It's complete bait and switch.
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I suspect that's just so they can make sure that the plebs use it and only their customers can have ZFS on Linux without a bunch of hassle.
Re:Clones around, it's "enhanced clones" with trou (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm really surprised that this comment was modded up. Oracle is responsible for btrfs (negating the "filesystems" argument), Novell was the catalyst for the modern linux composited desktop with compiz/Xgl (negating the X argument), and if I thought about it for more than 10 seconds, I'm sure I could come up with a shitload of other examples where these two companies that you've "cherrypicked" have been a driving force for good in the linux world. I do agree with your sentiment but, you sound bitter for these companies not having contributed to technologies that you don't realise you are using. But, most likely, the have. And in a big way. I'm all for hating companies like Oracle but, hate them for the right reasons.
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I installed Oracle Linux 6 this week to test. Besides the blinding red color of everything, I was a bit annoyed to see how many times I saw the word "RedHat" in the installer and the boot process.. I mean, if your going to rebrand it, then freaking re-brand it!
Re:Clones around, it's "enhanced clones" with trou (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the bit of Oracle Linux which bemused me was the fact that installing Oracle 11g on it is is still non-trivial; it requires you to install a bunch of packages and tweak kernel settings. If you're going to distribute your own brand of Linux, you could at least have an installer option for "This is going to be an Oracle RDBMS server, please install everything I need and configure the kernel as needed". Giving you a script to run as root part way through the RDBMS install process doesn't really cut it.
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If they made that easy, companies wouldn't need Oracle DBA staffs whose primary job is to deal with Oracle Support, so their support and training business would take a hit. I don't think they really want to make it easy.
Umm.. No, its simple. (Score:3)
To the other guy who responded to this comment: If your DBA has to call Oracle support to figure out how to install it on Linux then you need a new DBA. It takes 10 minutes to prep a RedHat OS to install Oracle, its not complicated.
As for Oracle Linux, there is a package you can download which will install the pre-reqs called oracle-validated. From the links below:
Named after, and derived from Validated Configurations, oracle-validated also creates an oracle OS user and an oinstall and dba group. Kernel p
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The one that interests me the most (because it impacts me most directly) is XenServer. It's supposedly based on RedHat as well, and they do a degree of kernel hackery to get all their Xenery to work. I'd be curious to see where that will go, given that XenServer development isn't exactly what you'd call cutting-edge in many regards: Citrix seems to just cut and release, with little regard for many important things like documentation being up to date or full hardware support.
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You appear to be ignoring the bit where Oracle is developing btrfs and CRFS.
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I agree, however RH fails to realize that whatever code they are applying to the kernel does not belong to them, it belongs to the open source community of Linux, which is an open distribution that everyone is allowed to code for and as such deploy, but can not directly make money from, and this business model that RH says they are using, is supposed to be only for the service and support they offer with their packaged distro, however, keeping code secret, and making it that now what you pay for is the extr
Re:Clones around, it's "enhanced clones" with trou (Score:4, Interesting)
Redhat is allowed to do exactly what they are doing. Nothing in the GPL requires them to make their changes available upstream (although they usually do), it requires them to make any changes available to their customers. They still release their changes to the kernel source code, but they changed the way those changes are distributed to their customers.
They used to make these changes available as a patch set that could be applied to the vanilla source from kernel.org. "Enhancers" like Oracle and others would take the vanilla source, cherry pick the patches that they wanted to apply out of Redhat's patch set, and compile the kernel, possibly adding in their own patches. Now Redhat is making the changes available in a single large pre-patched tarball, which means that if Oracle doesn't want to apply all of the patches, then they have to hunt down the changes themselves which is more time consuming and error-prone.
Say Redhat comes up with a patch that tweaks the filesystem code in a way that in some cases makes an Oracle DB 10% slower. In the past, Oracle would just apply all RH patches except that one. Now they have to take the vanilla source, diff it against Redhat's patched source, hunt down all the changes related to that filesystem patch, back those changes out manually, and hope that they got it right.
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The Linux kernel doesn't belong to you or me or "the community", it belongs to the copyright holders, with Linus as the arbiter of their rights. Redhat isn't closing the source or keeping anything secret, you've misunderstood both how Redhat works and also how the GPL works.
Nothing in the GPL says that you can't make money directly from GPL'ed software. You're free to take any GPL'ed software, compile it, put it on a CD, and sell it as-is. In fact, that is how Redhat and a lot of others got started. Wha
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The chip isn't the problem. The real problem comes when the LED attached to the chip starts glowing when you reach thirty years old. Then everyone expects you to submit to your death at Carousel.
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Are you new here? Anonymous Cowards start at Score: 0.
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I know it doesn't drown out all the whiners but please accept my thanks for all your hard work.
I use CentOS on my server and I have nothing but praise for it. Some people like to live on the bleeding edge but for a server OS I appreciate the stability of CentOS.
Don't let the vocal minority get you down.
What about CentOS? (Score:2)
Re:What about CentOS? (Score:5, Informative)
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That's if you only use your modifications internally. If you read past the first paragraph you would see the condition that actually applies here:
Thanks for once again proving that Anonymous Coward often also means Anonymous Short Attention Span.
Re:What about CentOS? (Score:4, Informative)
Straight clones should still be possible as long as redhat complies with the GPL, the main things their changes to kernel packaging will do it
1: make it harder for unrelated distros (e.g. debian) to pigyback of redhats long term support work for kernel releases
2: make it harder for anyone else to provide high quality support for redhats patched kernels by making it much harder for them to answer the question when something goes wrong of "what did redhat change and why".
Re:What about CentOS? (Score:5, Informative)
Straight clones should still be possible as long as redhat complies with the GPL, the main things their changes to kernel packaging will do it
1: make it harder for unrelated distros (e.g. debian) to pigyback of redhats long term support work for kernel releases 2: make it harder for anyone else to provide high quality support for redhats patched kernels by making it much harder for them to answer the question when something goes wrong of "what did redhat change and why".
Debian does not use Redhat kernels. Two different distributions, packing systems and philosophies.
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Holy stuff, you have a very low /. ID number!
I switched to Debian from Red Hat way back when Red Hat started going commercial. I send them a check every once in a while. Debian and the packaging are sublime compared to my experience with RPMs. I assume file dependency hell has been fixed. I still get newbies going on Kubuntu, though...
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Holy stuff, you have a very low /. ID number!
Does he? I hadn't noticed. ;-)
Re:What about CentOS? (Score:4, Funny)
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I guess you haven't seen the MacBook Air....
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Mine's smaller, heh heh heh.
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Neither did I!
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Haha, you funny. Not Signal 11 funny, but funny.
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Me either
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Isn't it past your bedtime, Grandpa?
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Indeed but IIRC they have with some releases deliberately picked the same version as redhat so they can cherry pick redhats fixes rather than having t do the backporting themselves.
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Debian does not use Redhat kernels. Two different distributions, packing systems and philosophies.
They do, however, both use 2.6.32-based kernels. All the non-RedHat distros are cooperating to maintain a handful of kernel releases as long-term support releases and 2.6.32 is one of them. Red Hat's move to hide what patches they've included in their own kernel is hindering this effort and increasing the inevitable divergence between Red Hat 2.6.32 and the official upstream 2.6.32 releases.
Re:What about CentOS? (Score:5, Informative)
Well that's ominous (Score:5, Interesting)
TFA doesn't specify what this actually means, so let me speculate. They're not going to go closed-source; they'd be lynched. I think this is a reference to the fact that they're distributing their source prepatched now, to make it harder to just take their patches and apply them to other distros.
IMO that's kind of sleazy. They got where they are standing on the shoulders of giants. The deal was: here, have this free stuff, build on it, make money with it, but you have to keep giving back. And they got their value out of it, but now they're trying to give back only the minimum they're contractually obligated to do. It's legal and not purely evil, but still moderately scummy.
I don't really see it being that good for them, either. Oracle isn't going to have much trouble reverse-engineering the patches back out, but RedHat now ends up in a more difficult position: fewer of their patches will be incorporated upstream, so they have to spend more work porting them into each new release; they'll have less community review and bugfixes in their patches; and they're going to alienate the community.
On the other hand RH users won't end up in the worst scenario: stuck using RH's buggy crap and unable to do anything about it. The source will still be there; they can still dive in to figure out what's wrong and fix it instead of dealing with a black box. I know I had to more than a few times when supporting RHEL systems.
Re:Well that's ominous (Score:5, Informative)
RedHat employs Kernel devs, their patches go directly into upstream. This is for patches that will never make it into upstream for that kernel. Basically all the stuff RedHat backports to the old crusty kernels they use.
Re:Well that's ominous (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I can tell RH does give back. They give back a lot. And it must get kind'of annoying for them that other companies - some of whom give back nothing - copy RH Linux and significantly undermine RH's ability to earn revenue from their distro.
There are tons of companies out there that violate the GPL, give nothing back, or even actively undermine open source. I would suggest that your disapproval is better directed at them.
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it must get kind'of annoying for them that other companies - some of whom give back nothing - copy RH Linux and significantly undermine RH's ability to earn revenue from their distro.
But never forget that the vast majority of what Red Hat packages was created for free by others. Yes, Red Hat pays the most open source developers of any company with the possible exception of IBM, but that still amounts to just a small fraction of what they bundle up and sell as theirs.
To be clear, I have absolutely no problem with Red Hat bundling up tons of free software and selling support for it. I do have a problem with Red Hat whining and playing sneaky tricks with source distribution, just because s
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Red Hat sells support, not software, they would do well to remember that.
Both; to be honest; their Release CD images are still valuable. The fact that they limit access to the open access to the support forums is a complete pain even when we are fully paid up because most of our internal users aren't registered with RedHat and so we will never give direct access to all the people who might need it.
I'm not yet at all sure that this RedHat thing is a big problem; if it really is, then the correct solution is a license change at the kernel level. If RedHat can do this, then s
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You call "not releasing their change set as a patch" sneaky? Because I don't. If Oracle wants to do the work of a distribution for real then they can do that. Otherwise they can stop putting their name on shit. If they were smart they'd get someone to create and release a branded Linux for them. They're not smart, they're just powerful. Who goes Oracle on purpose?
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a couple of small nits.
RH requires a ridiculous support contract for access to patches.
Patches (as in source) are available for free; That's what CentOS bases off. It's the updates (as in binaries) which you pay for. If RedHat ceases to do this then I, and many like me, will start releasing them myself.
Finally, RH has only 4.8% of the packages Debian has, in a comparison of official stable repositories
Your comparison really isn't fair for several reasons. You are comparing only the core repositories of RH which are at a higher quality level than Debian's default repository precisely because they are more filtered. Try doing the same comparison with EPEL and/or RPM
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fewer of their patches will be incorporated upstream
Red Hat already submits all their stuff to mainline. They do it themselves, and they do it in advance, before they incorporate it to their product. How they pack their .SRPMs does not affect to how they upstream their code.
Oracle isn't going to have much trouble reverse-engineering the patches back out,
I doubt it.
Re:Well that's ominous (Score:5, Informative)
...fewer of their patches will be incorporated upstream, so they have to spend more work porting them into each new release; they'll have less community review and bugfixes in their patches; and they're going to alienate the community.
I guess it's not well known, even though it's not a secret. Red Hat pushes their fixes upstream first. After, and only after, they are accepted upstream are they then incorporated into the RHEL kernel.
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That's a good point. And a lot of their work is in backporting new features into old kernels, to which my criticism is less valid.
Re:Well that's ominous (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't really see it being that good for them, either. Oracle isn't going to have much trouble reverse-engineering the patches back out, but RedHat now ends up in a more difficult position: fewer of their patches will be incorporated upstream, so they have to spend more work porting them into each new release; they'll have less community review and bugfixes in their patches; and they're going to alienate the community.
I very much doubt Red Hat has any plans to change the way they work on the kernel master branch. This seems to be about their cherrypicking and backporting of patches to RHEL kernels. They want other distros - particularly Oracle it seems - to either do that work themselves or admit they are just rebranding Red Hat's work. For example in that big mega-patch they can simply add a few whitespace changes, if the same changes show up in Unbreakable Linux you know they started with the Red Hat kernel and worked from there. To be honest, I'm somewhat ambivalent about the whole thing. Making it a bit harder to cooperate is bad but making sure credit goes where credit is due is important so that people do the "invisible" work too.
Scummy is taking without giving back (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want scummy, look to companies like Oracle which just take, repackage, and rarely give back. They're the real problem, not RedHat.
RedHat's patches still get submitted upstream for inclusion in the main kernel, which very often does happen.
I have no sympathy whatsoever for leeches that were taking RedHat patches and rolling their own distributions without contributing enough back on their own.
I fail to see how this affects seperate distros like Debian, which aren't based on RedHat-patched source in the first place.
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I actually don't have a problem with that. RedHat does not have an exclusive right as a distributor. My personal belief is that if the world gets better use of the software by distributing it more in this manner, that net good is being done.
The GPL ethos is you sell support, not software. The playing field is supposed to be level for the software, and you make a name by being the best at support. What RH is doing here is pushing for the software itself to be the feature they're selling, and that's going
Red Hat Did 12.8% of the 2.6.20 Kernel (Score:5, Informative)
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can hardly agree more.
but i also fear that open source success is going toward this kind of crap: make it hard to get the source / changes properly, inserting as many BSD-licensed-and-don't-give-anything-back code etc etc. Not counting all the lets-use-GPL-closed-source-its-unlikely-we-get sued (RedHat of course will never do that, but SO many small companies do)
Oh well, human nature & stuff.
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TFA doesn't specify what this actually means, so let me speculate. They're not going to go closed-source; they'd be lynched. I think this is a reference to the fact that they're distributing their source prepatched now, to make it harder to just take their patches and apply them to other distros.
One problem I see with this is that current installations of RHEL have to be patched too. Businesses relying on RHEL who can't get patches will possibly switch. If Red Hat wants to grow more it can't treat it's customers like MS does, like shit.
Falcon
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RHEL customers don't need the individual patches. They just download and install the updated RPMs from RedHat.
Or do I misunderstand what you're saying?
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Diff? (Score:2)
Someone educate me: Why are people incapable of running the diff command between Red Hat and the pure kernel sources in order to get just the patches?
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Re:Diff? (Score:5, Insightful)
That only gives you the patch broken up in space, not in time.
The idea is that Red Hat has patches for specific issues that are developed at different points in time. These patches may modify the same files as previous ones, or even the same blocks of code. By having all patches applied at once, the singular diff does not tell you which component of the patch fixed which issue.
This is really only relevant for providing commercial support. Previously, by having patches associated with known issues applied sequentially, it was much easier for another company to say "Oh you're having Issue X? Well Patch Y will fix it." Now their options are to reverse-engineer the monolithic .diff to find the part that fixes a specific issue, or tell their customers they have to apply the entire patch. Again, that's not something you'd care about if you're a desktop end-user, but in a corporate IT environment it makes a difference.
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I somewhat agree. RHEL's pre-patched kernel doesn't affect upstream. If you want upstream patches broken up by time, checkout the kernel from its git repository & browse away... Hint: The commit messages describe what each group of changes addresses.
Of course, I still think its a shitty thing to do. What if Red Hat's upstream (Linux) made it harder for RHEL devs to support their custom selected kernel code... If it Red Hat suddenly couldn't pick and choose which Linux mainline patches to apply to
Re:Diff? (Score:4, Interesting)
The only "downstream" of RHEL that is significantly affected is Oracle, a company that rebuilds RHEL, sells it as their own "Unbreakable Linux", and then tells database customers that they really shouldn't run RHEL, they should run Unbreakable instead. A bunch of those customers run Oracle DB on RHEL from when Oracle was a Red Hat partner (before they started trying to poach the big DB customers). Oracle does much less for Linux (and Open Source in general) than Red Hat. Oracle throws a little bit of code over the wall when they have to, while Red Hat has bought other companies closed-source software and Open Sourced it.
I haven't looked yet (because I rarely need to see individual patches; I mostly just care about the end result), but Red Hat has said that customers will have access to the patch information, so cutting Red Hat out because they restrict that would be dumb (since as a customer you'd get it anyway). A lot of work in making the Linux kernel "enterprise-ready" has been (and continues to be) done by Red Hat.
Basically, Red Hat forks the kernel for each major RHEL release and then maintains it on their own. They backport patches from upstream as well as develop patches for their kernel (which they submit upstream). Do you think LibreOffice should be required to distribute every individual patch they've made to OpenOffice, or X.org vs. XFree86?
Re:Diff? (Score:4, Interesting)
Red Hat has said that customers will have access to the patch information
So what's to stop Oracle from becoming a customer? :)
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"just the patches" would be nice. But a diff doesn't give you that. It gives you a monolithic patch with no history or context.
Do not panic (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe they have no beef against CentOS, actually I've seen at least one Red Hat employee encouraging the use of CentOS, since Red Had is the "de facto upgrade path" (not the exact words, but something along this way). So you freely enlarge the customer base, which will go to Red Hat when they need higher level commercial support. And for the free ones, even Microsoft has recognized they cannot sell to students, and are giving away the software anyways.
However Oracle is another deal. They just slap Oracle logo on Red Hat, do not acknowledge the source, and sell is as "unbreakable Linux". This would make a regular person ashamed of himself. They benefit a lot from open source but not giving back much in return. Do not start me with what they're doing to Solaris, Java, and OpenOffice...
So I'm with Red Hat on this one, at least until they do something directly bad to CentOS.
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In practice, we're about to switch from Solaris 10 on SPARC to Ubuntu Server in x86 VMs. Coulda been RHEL 5, wasn't. (We had no need of commercial support and the hosting company had Ubuntu as a standard offering. I have my qualms, but it should be possible to beat into robustness.)
CentOS is Red Hat for almost all practical purposes except if you're running proprietary software that lists RHEL as supported.
In my experience, Red Hat's actual tech support is shit. OTOH, buying a licence does help pay for all
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Personal preference: because it's close enough to Debian, pretty much ;-) Most of what we'll be using it for is to run Java (and Sun^WOracle Java at that, not even the distro OpenJDK). So we can do that and treat it as an almost-sane operating system.
Scientific Linux 6 (Score:5, Informative)
Scientific Linux 6 is already out. See http://ftp1.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6.0/x86_64/os/sl-release-notes-6.0.html [scientificlinux.org] for their detailed release notes. If there was any doubt in your mind that the direct rebuild projects are unaffected by this move, there shouldn't be any longer.
It's pretty clear they're trying very hard this time around to stay in lock-step with upstream (what they call TUV and what CentOS calls PNAELV) and add fewer packages into the mix directly. They're also funded to do this work full-time by the US government, and since many universities and national labs rely on SL, it's not going away any time soon.
If you've never tried it before, I encourage you to do so. To quote the old tagline, it's already ready already.
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Thanks for that. I've been using CENTOS and been quite happy with it. For what I do, I don't need to be (and will never really be) up to the minute with versions anyway -aside from keeping up with security patches to the extent I can. Are there good reasons, other than speed of the release cycle, to move from CENTOS to SL?
well done! (Score:2)
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And RedHat _directly_ pushes their upgrades back to the linux kernel and numerous other projects. The original poster has _no_ idea what they're talking about. This is not a change to general RHEL packaging, it's only a few abused packages, such as the kernel, which Oracle modifies heavily in their repackaging for this "Unbreakable Linux", which frankly isn't "Unbreakable", it's merely tuned for Oracle, which is typically very fragile.
Not good for the future of Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
If every distro is doing the same thing, this is not going to be very good for the future of Linux. Engineers at every distro are going to waste a lot time trying to figure what other distros had been patching, which part of the code had been changed while a specific issue was fixed, etc. Everyone is going to end up wasting a lot of time, and creating a lot of confusion.
Even though Linux distros are quite fragmented, but the current kernel development has been working quite well, because every distro is playing by the rule (more or less), which is quite transparent. Now, with this kind of one time big change by RH, even though you can still diff on all the source codes, it's not going to be easy to figure what has bee done (and why). And I think it's going to trigger other distros to behave similarly.
And it will be even harder for the users. As a user, if we have in-house-built applications that rely on specific version of a library or module, we might not want to have a giant patch on basically everything, we probably want only small, concise, specific patch for some critical security problems. I'm starting to wonder how are we going to manage that.
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It wont be a problem because all the patches/fixes end up in git form upstream first, before they even hit a shipping RHEL kernel. Because of this, there is no confusion. I don't think you even use Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a product as you can't pick and choose patches and still remain in support for that modified package. You may as well just build upstream and port back those security fixes you need, which you can do because the fixes are pushed there first.
If this is the case, and I'm just imagining
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It wont be a problem because all the patches/fixes end up in git form upstream first, before they even hit a shipping RHEL kernel.
Except that no distro uses the raw, bleeding-edge upstream git version of the kernel that RHEL's sending their patches to. They all use an older release with backported patches. If every distro was to maintain their own version of the kernel and keep it a secret which backported patches they were including like Red Hat is doing, there'd be a huge duplication of effort as everyone had to figure out for themselves which patches needed backporting in order to fix specific bugs. What's more, users would encount
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If every distro is doing the same thing, this is not going to be very good for the future of Linux.
If every distro were doing as much (proportionally) upstream work as Red hat, it would be very good for the future of Linux.
Engineers at every distro are going to waste a lot time trying to figure what other distros had been patching, which part of the code had been changed while a specific issue was fixed, etc.
But, they shouldn't be. They should be tracking *upstream*, putting their effort into *upstream*, instead of following other forks of the kernel.
Even though Linux distros are quite fragmented, but the current kernel development has been working quite well, because every distro is playing by the rule (more or less), which is quite transparent.
But, this has nothing to do with upstream kernel development, to which Red Hat is still contributing directly. This only has to do with development of Red Hat's Linux-based kernel (which is actually a fork).
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If you're "companies that want the ability to fix problems themselves", then why are you using RHEL to begin with? Certification and support only apply to binaries provided by Redhat.
What? (Score:3)
The Letter instead of the Spirit of FOSS (Score:2)
So basically Red Hat is telling us because they cannot legally change to be a fully closed source project they will just try to go against the spirit of FOSS as much as possible without breaking the letter of it?
Stupid Kernel Question (Score:2)
As a user of Linux since Slackware was on 13 floppies, here's what I don't understand about the distros: Instead of sticking with an old kernel release and backporting patches, why not move forward to the latest kernel? Coming from the days were it was more common than not to compile your own kernel from vanilla source for whatever distro you were using, I've never gotten in trouble doing that. A few times I've left out an option and had to recompile. But I've never had a new vanilla kernel break other aspe
Red Hat is not being evil (Score:2)
Linux-Mag covers the Rat Hat decision much better
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/8414/
Increasingly, Red Hat’s major competition is just saying “hey, we’ll let Red Hat do the engineering work and just provide support.” This is true of Oracle, and Novell to a lesser extent. Oracle has been riding on Red Hat’s coattails for years and has said it would do just that, saying that companies should compete “purely on the support side of the business.”
Novell still does its own very fine Linux distro, but if you look carefully, the amount of new features and energy put into its Linux distro the past few years has waned a bit. The company has ramped up support offerings for RHEL in the meantime, and put a lot more energy into things like SUSE Studio.
Oracle is just content to leech off of Red Hat. While Novell is trying to woo customers over to SLES by supporting RHEL as a bridge to SLES, Oracle just freeloads off of Red Hat’s distribution.
It’s a good thing that the GPL and other open source licenses allow companies to jump in and provide support for competitor’s products. But this trend isn’t healthy for the larger community — and it’s not something that can or should be solved by licensing. Companies in the market for Linux services should exercise a little forward thinking and reward the companies that are doing the most to maintain the ecosystem. Here’s a hint: It ain’t Oracle. Even if that Oracle support contract is a bit cheaper than Red Hat’s right now, what do you think Oracle’s going to charge if it manages to marginalize Red Hat?
Bottom line: If you want to snipe at Red Hat for its admittedly community unfriendly change, at least recognize that the company is still doing more than its share of the work.
Re:Oh no... (Score:5, Informative)
CentOS is fine, because they're a 100% clone of Red Hat. Red Hat is putting their kernel patches together instead of separate. If you wanted to pick and choose which ones you used and make something different, it would be *slightly* more difficult. But considerate the last release was broken out. You know what they were starting with. Take a diff of the new patchset against the old one, and you should have an idea of what they've changed or added.
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CentOS is unaffected, right up until the point you start running into problems... at which point Red Hat's source-hiding antics will make it a real pain to dignose and fix the issue, especially if it's most easily solved by reverting one of the patches.
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If there is a problem introduced with a Red Hat patch, it will be fixed upstream. And since CentOS promises binary compatibility with Red Hat, they tend to just take the Red Hat sources and compile them as is.
And Red Hat isn't hiding their source. They're just not listing kernel patches as broken out. Any kernel developer should be able to look at their existing patch set, compare it to new kernel patches floating around and figure it out. It isn't rocket surgery. Don't make a mountain out of a red hat-rack
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they're not denying the source. they're just bundling togheter the vanilla kernel AND their own patches, nothing wrong with that from a GPL perspective, there's nothing in the license that says your changes have to come in the form of patches.
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Well, CentOS are AGES behind their original schedule on the CentOS 6 release. 5.6 is well behind as well. That's not a basket I'd be putting eggs in right now.
Re:Here goes last supporter of open-source (Score:5, Insightful)
Goatse, again.
Man, you are hilarious. No one in history has ever done that before. And you've created a couple accounts today just for that. When you look back on your life, I'm sure you'll feel content and fulfilled.
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...is it bad that seeing a goatse makes me wax nostalgic?
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Had you clicked on the link, you would know the GP is a troll who has been posting goatse links on throwaway accounts.
UID over 2 million + link to blog.com = troll.
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I rest my case.
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Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Even in open source.
Power corrupts, and absolute power is kind of interesting. John Lehman
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GOATSE LINK.
By the way kiddo, find something new to shock us with. Slashdotters are pretty much immune to that one.
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Okay, wait, goatse link threads are not something I would normally post in, but I have to ask.
By "or something" do you mean that you didn't look at it long enough to really be sure what it was (and I pray for your sake that this is the case), or are you just giving voice to that little, terrified piece in the back of your brain that insists that cannot be human?
Re:LOL, people still use Linux? (Score:5, Funny)
Why don't you last 3 linux users just swallow your pride and buy a mac like everyone else with more than 2 brain cells has done in the last few years?
I know you're just a troll but I can't resist. First of all, Linux and RHEL in particular, runs on actual servers. You know, those computers Apple slowly are phasing out? Xserve is gone, and Mac Pro server is soon to follow. And, Linux pisses on Mac OS X when it comes to market share on servers. Lastly, it's Mac users that are used to swallow other guys 'pride', so just stick to what you're best at: Sucking cock.
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Nonsense (Score:2)
Red Hat submits their patches upstream for inclusion in the main Linux kernel.
According to earlier posts, they even submit them upstream before they include them in the RHEL kernel.
Those upstream submissions are not monolithic/merged, so distros which build from the Linux source instead of a distro's source should not have a problem. That includes Debian.
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One of the major reasons the Linux Kernel people moved to shorter releases is so that distros would stop back porting features. Debian should either be basing it's distro on a long term supported kernel (bug fixes but no new features) or periodically updating to something known stable.
Re:Red Hat certification classes cost a small fort (Score:4, Informative)
If you round off their 2010 income numbers, subscription income totals to $639 million (85.3%), and training service income totals to $110 million (14.6%). That is all on page 40 of their 2010 Annual SEC (10-K) filing [redhat.com]. The subscriptions had a 93% profit margin, and the training had a 36% profit margin this year. Which makes sense, I imagine training services cost quite a bit, you would probably have equipment and training material costs, as well as trainer's salaries. Then, at least some of the time, there would be travel and hotel costs incurred for the trainers themselves, anytime they are training groups.
According to page 48 of the same report, they spent $272 on sales and marketing, which the fancy training mailer pamphlets would fall under. However, that would also include expenses from sponsoring Open Source conferences under the same line item (its not all wasted on those fancy pamphlets).
Research and Development I imagine covers salaries for Kernel and subsystem developers. R&D costs total $148 million. Administrative costs were $104 million. According to the 10-K report, they have 3,000 employees globally.
Total operating expense for 2010 was $534 million, once you have tacked on taxes the Net income comes to $87 million.
There is a lot of boring stuff in SEC filings, most always something interesting to learn from them though. If you really want to find out what a company is all about, there are some interesting details, a lot of it is in there. It explains in brief detail what each line item in the Balance Sheets and Income Statements actually mean in mostly plain English. Plus, the executive summary gives you some insight into their management's frame of mind, business model, and strategies.
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we recently were stunned by the very high cost of redhat support. Its more expensive than microsoft.
I suspect you were comparing licensing (MS) to support (RH), not support to support.