Red Hat Obfuscation is a Tempest in a Teapot
Voting with one’s pocketbook and one’s feet is exactly what software freedom is about.
By Stephen Walli on Wed, 03/16/11 - 2:12pm.
I encountered another reference in the mainstream analysis to Red Hat “obfuscating” their work on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This really is a tempest in a teapot.
- It makes economic sense for Red Hat to get any true kernel fixes they discover back upstream into the mainline so nobody (including Red Hat) suffers.
- RHEL-only fixes they discover should likely make it into Fedora if they are relevant, so no one on Fedora suffers.
- As to which downstream patches Red Hat applies to create RHEL, that really is their business, and if CentOS, Oracle, et. al. want to do the forensic work to sort it out, they will. And CentOS will again match RHEL. Those that care can do the work. Nothing prevents it from happening.
- For CentOS "customers" that are NOT Red Hat customers: they may need to sort out whether to move to a better supported gratis server like Ubuntu. This is ALL GOOD for Canonical long term. And Red Hat certainly hasn't lost anything. Neither has free software nor open source.
- For Red Hat customers that mix-and-match RHEL and CentOS: they need to sort out what they want to do. Some will pressure Red Hat. Some will investigate alternatives. (This may be bad for Red Hat long term, but those folk aren’t necessarily good customers. And others may finally true up so it may be a wash.)
- Pure-play paying Red Hat customers don't care.
The rules that the FSF put in place in their license and that Linus used allow Red Hat to do what they’re doing to protect their business. I think folks complaining about the “obfuscation” need to separate in the minds the free software project that thrives from the product being sold. It's not like Red Hat hasn't invested an enormous amount of economic effort in Linux year-on-year for 15 years, and continues so to do. One could question what actual economic value CentOS contributes to Planet Linux by repackaging RHEL.
For those that are really unhappy, they can speak with their pocketbook or their feet. It's their right in the marketplace and exactly the vision for software freedom that Stallman argued in 1985 and the Open Source Initiative reinforced in 1997.
Tempest meet teapot.
- About Open Minded
Stephen is the Technical Director of the Outercurve Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation with the goal of bringing software developers and open source community members together to participate in open source projects.
Stephen has worked in the IT industry since 1980 as both customer and vendor. He was most recently a consultant on software business development and open source strategy. His customers included Microsoft, the Eclipse Foundation, the Linux Foundation. He's an adviser to Ohloh (acquired by SourceForge), Bitrock, Continuent, and eBox.
He organized the agenda, speakers and sponsors for the inaugural Beijing Open Source Software Forum as part of the 2007 Software Innovation Summit in Beijing. Stephen was VP Open Source Development Strategy at Optaros, a business manager at Microsoft on open source, and VP R+D and founder at Softway Systems, a venture-backed company that developed a UNIX portability environment for NT before being acquired by Microsoft. He was a long time participant and officer at the IEEE and ISO POSIX standards groups, representing both USENIX and EurOpen (E.U.U.G.) and a regular speaker and writer on open systems standards since 1991.
His personal blog: Once More unto the Breach.
Follow Stephen on Twitter @stephenrwalli
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