Red Hat and the Clone Wars IV: Knives Out
Today SUSE announced its intent to do a “hard fork” of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and yesterday Oracle came out with a press release aimed squarely at Red Hat and IBM, and trying to claim the high road in keeping Linux “open and free.” It’s fair to say that the knives are out. It’s not surprising but it is disappointing in a number of ways. I still have a number of other posts in the works but wanted to get some thoughts down on this one before too much time passes.
If you read Oracle’s press release without any awareness of Oracle’s history with open source, it sure reads like Oracle is a champion of all that’s good and open. It says so many lofty things about Oracle’s contributions to Linux (fair, Oracle has made significant kernel contributions, and Oracle database running on Linux was huge for adoption) and Oracle’s goal for transparency and openness around Linux. That one requires a bit more examination.
Chapter V:
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Red Hat and the Clone Wars V: Oracle Linux Origins
Since Oracle has weighed in about Red Hat’s source changes, it’s time to take a look at the history of Oracle Linux. That takes us back to 2006, the world of enterprise computing, and into new markets. Specifically, Java and middleware.
In the early days of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Oracle was a boon for Red Hat. Being able to run Oracle’s stack on RHEL meant Red Hat could expand with existing customers, and opened doors to business for Red Hat that wouldn’t have been open in the first place.
Heading into 2006, Red Hat was doing pretty well for a company that sold free software. Its annual revenue for FY2006 was $278.3 million, growth of 53% from FY2005. (Note: Red Hat’s fiscal year 2006 started in March 2005 and ran through February 2006. As part of IBM, its fiscal year is now tied to the calendar year.)
sdx central:
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Linux ‘clone wars’ have begun as Red Hat says it’s committed to open source
In recent weeks there has been a disturbance in the “force” of the enterprise Linux landscape, having to do with clones (no this isn’t a Star Wars story…).
Red Hat has long been one of the leading enterprise vendors for the Linux operating system. The company’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux (commonly known as RHEL) has been tremendously successful bringing in billions of dollars to Red Hat and its parent IBM.
Linux is open source, which means that source code should be open and shared, which is also true for Linux enterprise distributions like RHEL. The open nature has enabled a vibrant ecosystem of so-called “RHEL clones” over the years that have taken the open-source code binaries used to build RHEL and repackaged them as their own distributions. Among the many clones is Oracle Linux, which got its start in 2006.
One of the most popular community approaches was the CentOS project, which Red Hat acquired in 2014. The CentOS project underwent a series of changes in 2021 with the debut of CentOS Stream, which caused some concern by users about how it could be used as a stable enterprise platform. Those changes led to the emergence of a series of new community distributions based on RHEL, including Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux.
Chapter VI:
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Red Hat and the Clone Wars VI: Obfuscating Kernel Code for Fun and Profit
In our last episode we talked about the origins of Oracle Linux. This time around, we’ll look at one of Red Hat’s responses to the threat posed by Oracle Linux. Specifically, Red Hat’s decision to “obfuscate” the kernel source delivered in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6, and how it communicated (or didn’t) those decisions.