Oracle prides itself on its strong support and commitment to Linux. On a webpage at Oracle’s site entitled Oracle’s Technical Contributions to Linux”

Oracle waxes eloquently on Oracle’s support, commitment and leadership for Linux. The paragraphs describe Oracle’s “long history of strong support and commitment to Linux, as evidenced by numerous, on-going technical contributions to the Linux community.”

The page then states that “Oracle continues to strengthen its involvement in the Linux community by providing enhancements that facilitate the development and deployment of enterprise Linux solutions. By developing enhanced capabilities and contributing code, Oracle’s Linux engineering teams continue to make the Linux experience better for all.”

Finally, the page lists a variety of projects and contributions where Oracle is involved. Very impressive stuff and I applaud Oracle for their contributions.

Ksplice is an extension of the Linux kernel which allows you to apply security patches to a running kernel without having to reboot the operating system. What’s the point in having a highly redundant clustered database that never needs to go down if it’s running on an operating system with a security hole that requires a reboot to patch? I highly recommend you read the wikipedia article I linked to above to read up how Ksplice works – it’s very cool.

From its founding in 2008 thru July 20th, 2011, Ksplice, Inc. the company that developed the Ksplice technology, provided prebuilt and tested updates for RedHat, CentOS, SuSE Enterprise Linux and other linux distributions – though not Oracle Linux.

On July 21st, 2011, support for RedHat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Enterprise Linux was dropped. It was announced that going forward this would be a feature only on Oracle Linux to customers who pay for premier support and only then when running Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK).

What happened on July 21st to cause Ksplice to drop the most popular enterprise linux distributions?

On July 21st, 2011, Oracle completed its acquisition of Ksplice, Inc.

[update] I also saw this tweet by ORCL_Linux, Oracle’s official twitter account for it’s Linux group:
“#Oracle Buys Ksplice…makes Oracle #Linux the ONLY OS with zero downtime patching bit.ly/qCZTBq ”