yeah, that sucks
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| herzeleid Jul 22, 2011 1:59 PM EDT |
Their first order of business is naturally to remove support for all distros except their own unbreakable linux, so that they can claim sole ownership of the rebootlesss kernel upgrade. |
| fewt Jul 22, 2011 2:12 PM EDT |
ksplice hasn't ever been a completely open source product. It's always been an FOSS kernel hook and an at-cost service. I'm not surprised the first order of business at Oracle was to kill support for RHEL. I'm sure this move is in retaliation for RedHat's kernel source process change that happened a few months ago to obfuscate patches from Oracle. I don't condone Oracle's move to kill ksplice for RHEL and SuSE, but it makes sense from a business perspective since they are competitors and it wasn't really open technology. That said, I have Ksplice floppy disk shwag that is now ultra rare, ebay here it comes! /joke |
| herzeleid Jul 22, 2011 2:25 PM EDT |
It may not have been free speech, but it was reasonably priced for enterprises and free beer for private users, so I'm sorry to see it go away. None of the technology is magic, but it might be tedious to create an equivalent product while dancing around the patent claims which Oracle will be sure to raise. |
| fewt Jul 22, 2011 2:32 PM EDT |
I didn't mean to imply that I wasn't sorry to see it go, I'm with you there. |
| herzeleid Jul 22, 2011 2:40 PM EDT |
Interestingly, the ksplice website currently redirects to a page on the oracle website which offers free ksplice service for ubuntu and fedora, though RHEL and SLES are no longer mentioned. So while there is a change in policy it may not be as bad as first feared. |
| JaseP Jul 22, 2011 2:44 PM EDT |
If there is a kernel hook, that puts that piece squarely in the GPL v2... I suggest that competing tech be published in order to secure prior art rights. |
| Grishnakh Jul 22, 2011 3:00 PM EDT |
I'm no expert on Ksplice, but the Wikipedia page sums it up pretty well. The software itself appears to already be open source, so there's nothing keeping other distros from using it. The problem is that it isn't just something you put in the kernel and that's it: every time you want to publish a patch with it, you have to have engineers create that patch, which can require some manual work if any data structures have changed (which is not uncommon with Linux). That's why it was a paid service: someone has to do this manual work every time a new security patch is released. With Ksplice the company gone, this means that any interested distros will have to hire some engineers and do this themselves, instead of just hiring the experts at Ksplice Inc. to do it for them. For a big distro like Red Hat, this shouldn't be that much of a problem. Who knows, maybe they could get one guy to do it on the side in addition to his regular duties, but that depends on how involved the work is. |
| henke54 Jul 22, 2011 5:16 PM EDT |
Version 0.0.9 still available : http://knoppix.mirrors.tds.net/pub/linux/frugalware/frugalwa... http://web.archive.org/web/20101213212354/http://blog.ksplic... |
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