Red Hat Disses Oracle, Questions Open Source Status - Oh Snap!
Red Hat Disses Oracle, Questions Open Source Status - Oh Snap!
Posted 05/26/2010 at 5:06am
| by Paul Lilly
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Following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, some analysts have heralded Oracle as the biggest and baddest open source vendor on the block, but not everyone is buying it. Some, like Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat, don't even consider Oracle to be an open source company at this point, let alone the largest one.
"I wouldn't even consider calling them an open source company at all," Cormier said. "When you're making a choice as a company on what's open and what's closed then your customers suffer."
Cormier went on to accuse Sun of sometimes holding back "the good stuff" from the open source community in developing MySQL, claiming that "open is not just seeing the code. Open is also having a community of developer. OpenSolaris is not open. There is no community other than Sun people developing Solaris."
Cormier did admit that there are some parts of Oracle he would consider open, but nothing that approaches the level of openness at Red Hat.
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AntiHero
May 26, 2010 at 2:26pm
There's a reason they're leaving it somewhat closed. It is meant to be used on a more business level, and really, they're protecting the userbase from screw ups. If someone makes a program that has a major bug that conflicts with something else, the IT guy has to figure it out, and if it's an uncommon problem, it could cost thousands of dollars by the time everything's done. Really, it's good that they do that, calling them open is kinda stupid, they should call it open source based.
k11k
May 26, 2010 at 10:32am
Just wait till all the developer who had an hand on linux decide that its making money and they want apart of that too. I'm glad that it not well adopt in the consumer world, that will keep linux free. When it becomes use as much as window. All those patent seems to come with a price and royalties fees.
Neon Samurai
May 26, 2010 at 11:03am
The licensing issue: a developer can not come out at some future point and say "I wrote this bit of Linux - pay me." Any accepted contributions to the kernel come under the kernel's GPL2 license. A developer who owns the license to all code in some separate project may choose to re-license it. The past code would remain GPL though so if it's a good application, a fork may develop to replace the no-longer free version.
Patents are more interesting. Those who have made public patent claims against the kernel have never taken the next step and specified the infringements so that they can be licensed or recoded. Find infringement, try to settle with party out of court, settle through courts if no private resolution. Patent claims are highly suspect and have yet to be used for more than media grandstanding. It's more likely that the kernel source is being infringed by third parties. Everybody can audit Linux on a whim but how compliant is all that closed source out there?
In both cases, time will tell ultimately. After all, it's decided by the courts and if that is in the US, then anything but rational thinking may prevail.
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