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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Wow,

It certainly gives you a feel Red Hat is feeling some resentment concerning those who "take" "their" source code.

RH is one of the largest businesses based on open source software. What's up? Are they feeling so much pressure they feel a economic need to stop "free loaders?" Is it simple greed?

There was a lot of sniping concerning Red Hat and Ubuntu's contribution to desktop Linux a while back. Another salvo in the "free loaders" battle?

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If it encourages those companies to invest in linux in a similar way as Red Had does, I'm all for it.

And really, this is a very stupid definition of "obfuscate". This article is a non-article.

I've always felt that CentOS was in rather poor taste, even if it adheres to the spirit of the GPL. If you're really getting value out of Red Hat's enhancements to the system, then compensate them for their work.

Clearly you mean oracle here. Being an ex RH-er I can tell you RH sees great value in centos. It keeps small shops on the RH reserve even if they don't pay for a support contract - yet. Oracle has recently tried to position itself as an "enhanced" rhel especially wrt the kernel and this seems like an attempt by RH to make things a bit harder for them. I don't agree with the move though - you don't want to follow oracle down such slippery slopes...

What value does RH see in CentOS? I know quite a few admins using CentOS because it essentially gives them the benefits of RHEL without having to pay license fees. None of them have any intention of ever paying for a RHEL license.

My understanding is that this has a lot more to do with Oracle representing Red Hat's work as their own to their customers.

Well, it seems like that could be dealt with through an information campaign...

Oracle can outspend Red Hat very easily in advertising. Going head-to-head against them like that would be insane.

Besides that, Oracle has also made a lot of important contributions to Linux that Red Hat also benefits from (BtrFS is my favorite).

We don't need an arms race here...

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