Keep Linux Open and Free—We Can’t Afford Not To

Exactly. I don’t exactly disagree that RHEL should stay open source for all, but Oracle’s creating a bit of a pot/kettle situation here.

Oracle bad: Starting at the most recent case in 2020, Oracle sued Google for using some reverse engineered pieces and functions of Java in Android. Oracle owns Java and claimed that Google was infringing on their rights by creating similar API functions in the (open source) Android operating system. Oracle lost in the end, but if they were successful, that meant that reverse engineering software could be a sue-able offense.

For context, Linux devs reverse engineered pieces of Unix (and still do for tons of proprietary software like drivers), so if the Supreme Court sided with Oracle in that case, Unix companies could sue any Linux distro for infringing on their intellectual property.

This act by Oracle had a huge chilling effect on the open source community because they felt they couldn’t trust Oracle’s legal team. It was especially bad because Oracle uses so many open source softwares in their products that it felt like a corporate middle finger to the open source ethos.

Also, in general, Oracle is very litigious when it comes to their software. They have sued many other companies for what they think is infringement or violations of their licensing. That makes them not very popular when it comes to Oracle Linux or running anything in the Oracle OCI cloud platform and it takes some “oomph” out of their argument in the linked post.

IBM bad: They do the same thing. When they bought Red Hat in 2019, people were afraid the corporate giant would change Red Hat’s friendly approach to the open source community. RH financially and logistically supports many keystone open source packages (Ansible, ceph, GNOME, Fedora, LibreOffice) and they supported CentOS as a compatible platform for their paid Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution.

Recently, as the Oracle blog post calls out, Red Hat changed the way CentOS was released and added a free tier to RHEL. Reading between the lines, IBM wants to shift their focus from CentOS and have devs instead use a free license for RHEL and develop for that platform to increase their market penetration.

The open source community says that this change is a violation of the GPL, a license that’s the secret sauce that makes development of open source possible. On the technical side, this move locks down open access to source code and puts it behind a registration paywall. It also disrupts developers’ plans for future work, creating distrust between the community and Red Hat. If they are willing to change a big project like CentOS, the thinking goes, what else could be on the IBM corporate chopping block?

Both bad: Ironically, Oracle Linux is compiled from Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is marketed as a 1:1 replacement. This blog post from Oracle seems to really be self-serving because they are trying to take advantage of the situation and claim that they are really the saviors of open source.

At the end of the day, the last few years makes devs feel the EEE of open source platforms owned/supported by big corporations. Red Hat is the #1 contributor to the Linux kernel, IBM is #3. It’s hard to have nice things without taking corporate money or development.

The situation is more complex than Oracle’s blog post saying, “See?! Red Hat hates open source but we love it”—but they have some legitimate gripes about Red Hat’s recent moves.