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The pot accuses the cauldron of pushing aside open-source values to increase profits and reduce competition. The IBM subsidiary Red Hat announced last month that it will no
The pot accuses the cauldron of pushing aside open-source values to increase profits and reduce competition.
The IBM subsidiary Red Hat announced last month that it will no longer share the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with the whole world free of charge. Linux is open source and RHEL is licensed under the GPL, but Red Hat is only required to provide the source code to customers. Red Hat obediently does so, and those customers have the right to redistribute the code under this license.
For its part, Red Hat also has the right to terminate contracts with customers if this is the case. In doing so, Red Hat is essentially removing RHEL from the open source world. In an interesting twist, the pot bounces when the chance of blackening the wheel arises. In fact, it is Oracle that makes Red Hat’s dubious practices a problem.
Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect, and Wim Coekaerts, Head of Oracle Linux Development, attack Red Hat in a blog post. You make some interesting arguments. For example, IBM claims that it can’t afford to give RHEL away for free because it has to pay its own engineers. Before being taken over by IBM, Red Hat, as an independent company, could combine the payment of wages with the distribution of the RHEL source code.
However, Mike McGrath, VP of Core Platforms at Red Hat, insists that demand for RHEL’s source code comes primarily from organizations that want to use the code to build their own RHEL flavors and monetize it without to pay for it Red Hat. This reads as understandable frustration, but also as a simple excuse.
In our opinion, it’s hard to argue that the move by Red Hat and IBM is completely at odds with the spirit of open source. Still, we have doubts about the motivation behind Oracle’s complaints. A few years ago, the company got ahead of Red Hat by stopping free Oracle JDK updates for non-paying customers. In addition, Oracle has a legitimate reputation for retaining customers through licensing rather than openness or flexibility.
Oracle sees Red Hat’s move with regret, primarily because it endangers its own development of Oracle Linux. This distro is traditionally compatible with RHEL to avoid ecosystem fragmentation within the enterprise market. If Red Hat suddenly keeps the source code of RHEL to itself, it becomes difficult to maintain this compatibility. Incidentally, Oracle Linux remains completely open source.
The public feud leaves many viewers puzzled. Despite their great contributions to the open source community, neither IBM nor Oracle really have a reputation for being flexible, permissive, open companies. This perception comes from somewhere. Both sides have more than enough butter on their heads. But that doesn’t mean Oracle is wrong in this particular case.
Source: IT Daily
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