To continue my "Good or bad for open source?" post I'd like to talk about Oracle's news, Oracle Announces The Same Enterprise Class Support For Linux. Oracle announced that they are supporting RedHat Linux, minus the logos, plus additional bugfixes and bugs ported back to previous versions. From my experience, I bet it's that last feature that attracts customers. One of the problems customers have with open source is that to get their bugs fixed, they have to be willing to move to the latest version. Moving to the latest version in the middle of their development life cycle is often more difficult for them than living with the bug. That's why OpenLogic supports "older" versions of the 180+ open source software packages we support – including fixing bugs in the older versions.

However, while backporting bugs to previous versions of (not)RedHat may be what attracts Linux customers to Oracle, the hardest thing for Oracle will be not forking when fixing bugs on the latest version. Backporting bugs won't cause a fork. But what if an Oracle customer calls up with a new showstopper bug in the current version of Linux (that may or may not bother anybody else) and Oracle fixes it … and three months later RedHat either decides NOT to fix it, removes that feature altogether or fixes the problem in a totally incompatible way. Does Oracle Linux fork? Or do they maintain a forked version for that one customer? Or do they force the customer to migrate from the earlier fix to the sanctioned RedHat fixed version?

At OpenLogic we work with the community and the open source software projects to get any bugs fixed in the latest version and accepted "upstream." Oracle will not be able to do the same as I doubt RedHat is going to be too open to working with Oracle. Not when Oracle just announced that they are taking RedHat's product in order to try to win over RedHat's customers.