Oracle Linux honcho 'personally hurt' by Red Hat clone claims
Found on The Register on Tuesday, 02 October 2012
Oracle has taken its share of knocks for marketing a version of Linux that's package-for-package compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but according to Oracle senior engineering veep Wim Coekaerts, Oracle Linux's reputation as a copycat is entirely undeserved.
Coekaerts argued that although Red Hat markets a Linux distribution that's put together a specific way, it has no exclusive rights to the code for the various software packages that make up that distribution.
By the time RHEL 6 shipped with a new version of the kernel, Red Hat had already back-ported some 700,000 lines of code to work with RHEL 5's outdated kernel. "Talk about forks!" Coekaerts said. "That's not mainline Linux, that's a totally different, unique tree."
Of course Oracle is all for open source and taking the code you want. That's why Libre Office exists after Oracle failed hard to maintain the original Open Office version and later just gave it up and handed it over to the Apache Foundation because it became useless. That's why Oracle killed OpenSolaris in 2010 because it had no interest to provide a free Solaris version. That's why Oracle slowly turns MySQL into closed source, pretty much begging users to switch to a fork. Coekaerts can argue all he wants: Oracle never cared much about open source unless there is a way to make lots of cash from it. So if he wants to talk about forks, he should fork Oracle's clone completely, instead of using the RHEL sources all the time.