Red Hat Challenges Open Source Moochers

Red Hat Red (NYSE: RHT) has gotten fed up with what it sees as companies like Oracle and Novell sidling up to its Linux server operating system customers in a shifty manner and whispering “Wanna buy cheap support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux?” Red Hat finds this galling because it effectively gives away RHEL server OS as a loss leader so it can sell support and other services, and it doesn’t see why Oracle and others should act like parasites, making money from its hard work.

That’s why with the release of RHEL 6, Red Hat began to do something new. Instead of releasing the kernel package in its upstream form, with separate patches to be applied at build-time, all the patches are now pre-applied. This makes it much harder for competitors to pinch Red Hat’s support business, says Brian Stevens, Red Hat CTO.
Read More of Paul Rubens Blog Post on Datamation