Since Oracle has weighed in about Red Hat’s source changes, it’s time to take a look at the history of Oracle Linux. That takes us back to 2006, the world of enterprise computing, and into new markets. Specifically, Java and middleware.

Today SUSE announced its intent to do a “hard fork” of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and yesterday Oracle came out with a press release aimed squarely at Red Hat and IBM, and trying to claim the high road in keeping Linux “open and free.” It’s fair to say that the knives are out. It’s not surprising but it is disappointing in a number of ways.

Until the announcement that CentOS Linux 8 would be EOL at the end of 2021, CentOS users enjoyed a relatively drama-free period of stability that might suggest RHEL has always had a viable, dependable clone with predictable releases. That is, as you’re probably already guessing, very far from the truth.

After Saturday’s post I wanted to take a step back and talk about some history that many have either forgotten or weren’t familiar with in the first place. Some may remember it quite well, but haven’t quite gotten the lessons right the first time around. Let’s talk about Red Hat Linux and the early days of Red Hat Enterprise Linux before it was even called that. Red Hat sets the standard My Linux journey started with Slackware Linux in 1996, completely by accident. By that I mean that I had never heard of Linux or sought it out, until I stumbled on a 4-CD set and decided I wanted to learn more. I was studying English lit and Communications/Journalism at a state school in the northeast corner of Missouri. Nobody I knew cared much about computers beyond games or running Word to write their papers. It was literally years before I met someone else who was an avid Linux user. It was a surprise to learn, a bit later, that Slackware was a Linux and that many distributions existed. As I learned more and more about Linux, though, something became clear: Red Hat was the popular choice. Red Hat was the Coca-Cola of Linux, even before its IPO in mid-1999.

It’s been an exciting week for people who care about Linux distributions, FOSS licensing, FOSS distribution, FOSS business models, and the future of open source in general. Red Hat’s announcement that CentOS Stream will be the sole repo for public RHEL-related source code releases has generated a lot of chatter and exposed a lot of misconceptions about what the GPL requires and doesn’t.

WordPress turned 20 over the weekend. Older than that, if you count the b2 codebase WordPress forked from. 20 years for a project is quite an accomplishment, but WordPress hasn’t merely survived for 20 years. The open source CMS powers a huge chunk of the Internet and has shown how commerce and community can coexist successfully for the long haul. It’s hard to convey how impressive WordPress was when it was launched, if you haven’t dabbled with the CMSes of the time....

Last week I had the opportunity to present at Open Source Summit North America (2023) in the Open Source On-Ramp track. I promised to upload my slides by Monday of this week (oops) but didn’t factor in getting COVID. Apologies to anybody who came looking for the slides previously, I was pretty much under the weather all week. Better late than never, I hope. Here’s the deck in PDF form: Everything you need to know about Vim and text on Linux....

Even though I’m no longer writing full time, I do have a “bucket list” of publications I’d still like to write for, and Dark Reading has been one of those publications for many years. Happily for me, I get to cross that one off (though I’d do it again!) with this article, " SOSSA and CRA Spell Trouble for Open Source Software." Short version: Some ill-considered legislation that’s coming in the wake of Log4Shell poses a threat to open source software, particularly the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA)....

My friends, I have a request. That request is, for all that’s Holy, stop calling things “clickbait.” It’s an old and busted term that has no place in the media landscape of 2023.

I keep thinking about the arguments around content being used for AI data sets and the arguments around content being archived/offered by sites like Internet Archive. They don’t seem consistent, on either side. Corporations are happy to use data sets scraped from copyrighted content, but they surely don’t want their copyrighted content slurped up into data sets without compensation. On the flip side, a lot of the folks who (IMO rightly) support Internet Archive don’t want corporations to flex copyright against IA on the basis of IA being a public good....