Oracle: Red Hat is betraying the community and eliminating competitors

Oracle issued an announcement saying that Red Hat no longer discloses RHEL source code is betraying the community and eliminating competitors.

Red Hat published a blog on June 21 saying that it will no longer disclose the source code of the RHEL system. This news has aroused great indignation in the Linux open source community.

Now Oracle has also come forward to criticize IBM and Red Hat for abandoning the Linux open source community.

Oracle has developed the Oracle Linux system based on RHEL many years ago and provided it to customers on its cloud platform. Oralce Linux is similar to RHEL with a different name and is maintained by Oracle.

Oracle itself said that the development of new software is directly tested on the RHEL platform. Test OK Then there is no problem on Oracle Linux.

The following is an excerpt from the Oracle blog, and the original link is at the bottom of this article:

While Oracle and IBM have compatible Linux distributions, we have very different ideas about our responsibilities as open source stewards and about operating under the GPLv2. Oracle has always made Oracle Linux binaries and source freely available to all. We do not have subscription agreements that interfere with a subscriber’s rights to redistribute Oracle Linux. On the other hand, IBM subscription agreements specify that you’re in breach if you use those subscription services to exercise your GPLv2 rights. And now, as of June 21, IBM no longer publicly releases RHEL source code.

Why did IBM make this change? Well, if you read IBM’s blog attempting to explain its rationale, it boils down to this:

At Red Hat, thousands of people spend their time writing code to enable new features, fixing bugs, integrating different packages and then supporting that work for a long time … We have to pay the people to do that work.

Interesting. IBM doesn’t want to continue publicly releasing RHEL source code because it has to pay its engineers? That seems odd, given that Red Hat as a successful independent open source company chose to publicly release RHEL source and pay its engineers for many years before IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019 for $34 billion.

The blog goes on to mention CentOS. It is no surprise CentOS was top of mind for the author attempting to justify withholding RHEL source. CentOS had been a very popular free RHEL compatible distribution. In December 2020, IBM effectively killed it as a free alternative to RHEL. Two new alternatives to RHEL have sprung up in CentOS’s place: AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. Now, by withholding RHEL source code, IBM has directly attacked them.

And perhaps that is the real answer to the question of why: eliminate competitors. Fewer competitors means more revenue opportunity for IBM.

Finally, Oracle promised Linux developers, Linux customers, and Linux distributors that Oracle is committed to Linux freedom.

As long as Oracle distributes Linux, it will definitely provide its binary files and source code for free. Oracle welcomes a variety of downstream distributions, community and commercial distributions.

Additional links:

Original Oracle blog: