“I often read things on Slashdot or blogs where folks think that we’re proprietary and we just take the code and don’t contribute back,” Coekaerts said during an Oracle OpenWorld conference session in San Francisco on Tuesday. “It really hurts me personally, because we actually do a lot of really good stuff. All the work we do goes back to Linux. We’re really in it to make Linux better and not just copy.”
Coekaerts argued that although Red Hat markets a Linux distribution that’s put together a specific way, it has no exclusive rights to the code for the various software packages that make up that distribution.