By Adrian Bridgwater  August 4, 2014

 

Oracle has this month introduced the Oracle-flavoured Linux 7 open source operating system. Freely distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPLv2), Oracle Linux is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and follows the RHEL7 release, which arrived this June.

 

This distribution of Linux represents what Oracle would like to us to consider as its more open and community focused side, although of course a paid support model is available and widely adopted.

 

But it’s not just about whether the software is free or not; what matters today is how open it is and how the software itself is architected and used by the developers and users who come into daily contact with it. The company asserts that its latest baby is the “only major enterprise Linux distribution” that publishes all bug fixes and security errata publicly. This openness is hoped to achieve more flexibility than other commercial Linux distributions.

 

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