Oracle looks badly at Red Hat's decision and criticizes it without measuring words
since few weeks has been in the spotlight, the decision by Red Hat to restrict access to RHEL source code, because it has generated a lot of criticism and which for many is the signature of their own sentence.
Said restriction “prohibits” customers from sharing and redistributing the source code or use it to create a later distribution, which many say widely violates the GPL.
Before said decision Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux and Oracle Linux made their positions known a few days after Red Hat's statement and in the case of Oracle Linux, this was not measured and strongly criticized Red Hat, since it has denounced the extent to which IBM (Red Hat Owner) is trying to eliminate competition among Linux distributions in order to increase its profits. This is certainly an astonishing statement from Oracle, which is known for being a software licensing company.
And it is that in his publication, Oracle openly criticizes the decision of Red Hat and IBM, in which they say that they are "not good citizens of open source", in addition to which he refers to a Red Hat post in which he tried to justify the company's decision by saying that it was about paying Red Hat engineers for the work they do:
Although Oracle and IBM have compatible Linux distributions, we have very different ideas about our responsibilities as free software administrators and how to operate under GPLv2. Oracle has always made Oracle Linux binaries and sources available to all.
We do not have subscription agreements that interfere with a subscriber's rights to redistribute Oracle Linux. By contrast, IBM's subscription agreements specify that you are in violation if you use these subscription services to exercise your rights under GPLv2. And now, as of June 21, IBM no longer publishes the RHEL source code.
Interesting. IBM doesn't want to keep releasing RHEL source code because they have to pay their engineers? This seems strange, given that Red Hat, as a successful independent open source company, chose to release RHEL source code and pay its engineers for many years before Red Hat was acquired by IBM in 2019 for $34 billion.
Also Oracle mentions CentOS and that it tops Red Hat's "worry list" which attempts to justify the retention of the RHEL source code. CentOS has been a very popular RHEL-compatible free distribution and in December 2020, IBM effectively removed it as a free RHEL alternative, to which two new RHEL alternatives subsequently emerged instead of CentOS: AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, and now by withholding the RHEL source code, IBM has attacked them directly.
As for Oracle, we will continue to pursue our goal for Linux in the most transparent and open way we have ever done, while minimizing fragmentation.
We will continue to develop and test our software products on Oracle Linux. Oracle Linux will continue to support RHEL to the extent possible. In the past, Oracle's access to published RHEL sources has been important in maintaining this compatibility. From a practical point of view, we believe that Oracle Linux will remain as supported as ever until version 9.2, but after that there may be a higher chance of a compatibility issue occurring. If an incompatibility affects a customer or ISV, Oracle will work to fix the issue.
The comment surprised many in the community, for being Oracle criticizing Red Hat for ending the free distribution of RHEL code to non-customers. Under the terms of the GPL, and according to some analysts, Red Hat is only required to provide the source code to paying customers who receive RHEL binaries. Therefore, Red Hat's decision would not violate the terms of the GPL.
Oracle he also mentioned that he will continue to distribute the source code of his distribution Oracle Linux for free and make it backwards compatible with RHEL, without specifying how you will get the fonts in the future.
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