Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0 is the latest RHEL that came last year with a set of patches. Now the patches were all concealed, and came with the kernel. This means that the flaws were disguised. Only to be found out.

Although there has been much talk over it, Red Hat said it was a move to keep pace with the competition. There are three other players like CentOS, Novell, and Oracle with their Linux operating system tapping the heels of RHEL to keep it on its feet.

Red Hat felt that in the open source marketplace there were not many takers of products for which they might have to pay support charges. The three competitors of Red Hat have been taking away its customers. Red Hat has been all the while doing a lot to thwart such attempts.

Oracle’s Oracle Linux 6 and CentOS’es CentOS products are RHEL lookalikes. CentOS is almost the same as RHEL. So one could say that more than being different products they are all mere copies of RHEL. Given Oracle’s strong marketing tactics and financial girth, RHEL might have to rely on its recommendations from its existing customers. CentOS on the other hand has a wide pool of open source Linux coders. This is another competition that RHEL has to fend off.

All these reasons made RHEL hide the patch using a pre-bundled approach. By doing this the open source community won’t understand much about what has been changed. And the competitors would have the plan to start copying what RHEL did. Red Hat is fully authorized to do this, and it complies with the public license act of GNU.