Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

> Not that fighting a legal battle with IBM is something you can realistically do without losing your business, of course.

Doesn't this change affect Oracle Linux too? Suing people and even big companies is Oracle's favorite thing to do, and for once they'd be the good guys for doing so.

View on HN

I believe Oracle Linux might be the biggest target here.

Paying enterprises that decide to go with Oracle Linux are the real threat to RHEL not the free alternatives.

Very few people that are on the free alternatives will start paying for RHEL if the alternatives go away, it is more likely that they move to another distribution.

This is not even the first time Red Hat try to make Oracle life difficult.

Notice Alma's explicit mention:

"In the immediate term, our plan is to pull from CentOS Stream updates and Oracle Linux updates to ensure security patches continue to be released."

They did something similar with the Kernel in 2011. They stopped publishing the git tree for the RHEL kernel and only published the tarball with no version control. At the time, Oracle started a project to reverse engineer it back into a set of unique patchsets. Was kindof wild.

Not sure how long it lasted. It doesn't seem live now, though.

https://www.theregister.com/2011/03/04/red_hat_twarts_oracle...

https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/12/oracle_launches_redpa...

I hadn't thought of this, but this is an excellent point. Oracle vs IBM, who wins? The lawyers for sure, but for outsiders there would be no downside.

If IBM loses, we could find ourselves faced with even heavier restrictions on RHEL, including the inclusion of binaries and non-GPL'd code which would make it much more difficult for Alma/Rocky to build their own version.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com