Accusation against Red Hat: do you think this is true?

[hazel]

Another thing I found through the E-Bulletin. Most of this article is a rant about how difficult it is to play games in wine and how unfriendly the wine forum is (why doesn't he just dual-boot with Windows?).

But then comes a claim that Red Hat are putting "secret patches" into RHEL which make it unmaintainable by rival firms such as Novell/Oracle. Of course there would be nothing in the GPL which would stop them doing so, but if they are, this guy is right to say that it's against the spirit of FOSS. Has anyone else heard about this sort of thing going on? Or is it just FUD?

[coopstah13]

i didn't read the article, but my guess is that it relates to red hats recent change in policy with distributing sources

previously, sources for everything were supplied, along with red hat patches unapplied

now red hat is providing the source only after the patches have been applied to the software

[Rubberman]

FUD. I asked this question of one of the Scientific Linux maintainers that works with my wife at Fermi Lab. My question:

How does this relate to SL6 with regard to kernel patches? Red Hat News | Commitment toOpen

Her answer:

This does not affect us at all as we do not provide our own kernel patches. We just take what Redhat provides and rebuild it.

Personally, I think that the issue, as mentioned in the article/link, regarding to commercial competitors who are using RH source to deliver supported commercial distributions, such as OEL et al, is relevant here. For most of us, it is a non-issue.