This week at LWN: Red Hat and the GPL

Red Hat only has to release what they compile for RHEL to fully comply with the GPL. They do not have to release diffs and patches to the code - just the code they release. Since Oracle is competing with them for service, why should RH help them? Oracle can do their own difffs. Its messy and not fun but that's their problem.

Something to consider is that Red Hat depends on the community. If people decide to push a different distro more aggressively because it is easier to learn and to debug, then Red Hat will lose. Red Hat can't lose track of this because, in the end, Oracle wins if Red Hat can't leverage the open model.

Anyway, I agree their compliance approach may not be a major deal, except if developers do find it too inconvenient. It's possible a subset of the community might abandon "RH forks" in order to stick with RH; however, all distros are "forks" of each other, and playing too aggressive may bring more cons than pros.

To battle Oracle,

Red Hat should keep explaining the drawbacks of closed source. They are one firm that can really stand behind that message. People should ask themselves why they are using Oracle databases. Red Hat should seek partners that support competitors to Oracle dbs (eg, postgres).

And we do need to do something about this software patent madness. Oracle is using a very broken patent system to beat good honest competitors. Red Hat needs to showcase to the government the value of being open and how patents are killing innovators and firms that are good to society in favor of the more greedy and abusive who actually jeopardize security of software users.

So I hope they will reconsider their current move and maybe just use it as a stop gap measure.