On 12/28/20 8:04 PM, Gordon Messmer wrote: > On 12/28/20 5:14 AM, Laurențiu Păncescu wrote: >> This started with RHEL 6, and the likely motivation was to hinder >> Oracle Enterprise Linux, not to save build time. > > That was speculation at the time of the change, and no evidence has ever > supported it. "No evidence" besides the official declaration published on the Red Hat Blog by Brian Stevens, Red Hat CTO at the time: > Why did we make this change? To speak bluntly, the competitive landscape has changed. Our competitors in the Enterprise Linux market have changed their commercial approach from building and competing on their own customized Linux distributions, to one where they directly approach our customers offering to support RHEL. > Frankly, our response is to compete. Essential knowledge that our customers have relied on to support their RHEL environments will increasingly only be available under subscription. The itemization of kernel patches that correlate with articles in our knowledge base is no longer available to our competitors, but rather only to our customers who have recognized the value of RHEL and have thus indirectly funded Red Hat’s contributions to open source that will advance their business now and in the future. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/commitment-to-open