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.'"
Re:Gift horse = Mouth (Score:2, Informative)
He would always say he had no alternative under the GPL.
Then, clearly, he didn't know what he was talking about. Licenses don't apply to the copyright holder; they apply to redistributers. He could certainly have release xMule as binary-only, or as open source with a license that prohibits copying and redistribution (think Microsoft's "Shared Source" licenses). Perhaps he didn't want to do those things, given his goals in creating the project, but to say he had no choice is simply nonsense.