Hacker News Reader

Comment by housemusicfan | Hacker News Reader

Everyone is busy getting mad at Red Hat when the ones they should be directing their furor towards is Oracle. In simple terms, Oracle fucked this up for everyone and forced Red Hat's hand. They've been stealing megacorp contracts from RH left and right by undercutting them on price and how could they not? Their development is minimal. Truly "we're gonna build an OS...and make Red Hat pay for it." So while this situation sucks for everyone involved, this was indirectly Oracle's doing.

And if you're building infrastructure on free software that has dependencies on RHEL, or rather "free RHEL", shame on you. RHEL is for shops with wheelbarrows of money that used to run Solaris or HP/UX and are running proprietary software. What is happening is IT project managers are trying to justify their existence and cut costs, so they switch the contract to Oracle Linux so they can earn that bonus check.

View on HN

Exactly right. The real problem here is a deficiency in the GPL, which GRSecurity pioneered and IBM is now using. Any company in the same situation would do the same thing.

This is a weird take. Nothing Oracle did was wrong. RedHat's model can be used by anyone, why shouldn't another company make use of the source's? It's the risk of the model RedHat has gone for and also RedHat has added clauses to they're terms preventing resharing of sources which is against GPL.

Red Hat's EULA does not violate the GPL and what Oracle does is obviously wrong, it's parasitic and in the long term will kill RHEL (and thus also Oracle's version).

Big corps don't care one second about what HN thinks.

It is business as usual with any of them.

The violation is that the red hat distro is a derived work of GPL code whose source is not available.

I don't think you understand how the GPL works. Merely creating a derived work does not mean you must make source available publicly (a la AGPL).

That's true but you must give the source to your customer and they should be free to redistribute.

This is correct, and the customer has full rights to redistribute. But the original customer may be limited to paying Red Hat customers only and still remain in full compliance.

And they are! However Red Hat is then free to terminate their business relation with you.

Red Hat supplies the source to everyone their distributing the binaries to, no violation here.

Ah I see. I don't have the binaries so I can't have the source either. That's the part I was missing. Cheers

You can have the sources. Centos Stream.

Yet it's not bug for bug compatible because it's now upstream of RHEL. For things like drivers you want compatibility

It is incredible how people love to hate Oracle.

Maybe they should remove their Linux contributions as well, that they have been doing since around 2000.

the psychology of "ok if you dont like that, here is more punishment" seems very at-home with that company; more of the same ? really?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com