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Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To

oracle.com

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Re: Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To

#31
This could be totally well intentioned and completely honest but no one would believe it anyway. Oracle has burnt so many bridges I'm not sure it could ever recover reputationally from it. It's always about more than just the technology. Reputation will play a large part in anyone's decision making.

Re: Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To

#32
post #8

Yeah this is just opportunistic PR. Oracle cares less about Open Source than even the most brain dead Red Hatter. As with all things Oracle, they are taking the angle that potentially creates a revenue opportunity for themselves. This is fine. I get it but doing it under the guise of higher open source ideals is comically transparent. Their OEL market share mostly consists of them targeting specific Red Hat accounts…

And to be fair, Oracle has been a remarkably good steward of Java. It's truly amazing how fast and far Java has come since the Java 7 and Java 8 days. It's been on a rocket sled of development, while still being shockingly well behaved for earlier code. If there's any critique, it's "too fast". But that's nonsense, since the LTS work helps maintain stability.

And it's pretty wide open. They keep some things close to their vest, which is their prerogative, but even some of that stuff has been opening up over time as well.

It's not been a seamless transition, but it's not been awful either. Developers are managing.

It could have been far, far worse.

Re: Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To

#33
post #22
post #8

Yeah this is just opportunistic PR. Oracle cares less about Open Source than even the most brain dead Red Hatter. As with all things Oracle, they are taking the angle that potentially creates a revenue opportunity for themselves. This is fine. I get it but doing it under the guise of higher open source ideals is comically transparent. Their OEL market share mostly consists of them targeting specific Red Hat accounts…

Oracle does care about open source, to the extent that they have been the top Linux kernel contributor several times. https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/oracle-is-the-1-contribu... Oracle actually does not undercut the least expensive Red Hat support offerings. Oracle Linux support is $499/year for basic, and $1,399/year for premier. Both tiers allow 24x7 access to file service requests (SRs). https://www.oracle.com…

Based on your provided links the apples to apples comparison for RHEL Server Standard Support ($799) would be the Oracle Basic Support ($499)

Also, considering that OEL is downstream from RHEL how sustainable do we really think it would be for RHEL to downstream from OEL? How long would OEL invest and maintain in OS components that don’t directly benefit their specific offerings? Is there evidence to suggest there is any truth behind that offer? In my years of following the Linux ecosystem Oracle’s niche seems to have largely evolved around performance optimizations that solve specific problems they experience with other products or feature enhancements to facilitate new developments within their product ecosystem (which is still great for the community!) but what I have not seen is general purpose stewardship of the ecosystem of packages outside the kernel. I have no doubts they have made contributions of that nature but that has certainly not been a constant in what I have personally observed thus far. Perhaps I’m looking in the wrong places but I genuinely don’t believe Oracle would truly take on that responsibility nor do I believe that they would be anywhere near as effective as Red Hat at executing it

Re: Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To

#34

This is one of those uncomfortable situations where you find yourself on the same side as the devil.

Worse, I find myself applauding the devil for their championing Open Source! This is Oracle! The lawnmower[0]! The company that killed OpenSolaris! What mad world is this!?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m

Re: Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To

#35

Red Hat 5.0 (Hurricane) was my first-ever open source operating system. If you'd told me, 25 years ago, that one day Red Hat would withhold source from the Linux community, and that Oracle would be the champion of contributing back, I never would have believed you. This feels a little bit like when Ahmadinejad called out Putin for being a tyrannical narcissist.

I would have believed it. Red Hat always felt like a faceless corporation. And Oracle is just the successor to Sun Microsystems.

> And Oracle is just the successor to Sun Microsystems.

Oracle closed the formerly Open Source OpenSolaris, so no, I would not give them that credit.

Re: Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To

#36

It's GNU/Linux, Oracle. You can't even get _that_ right. ;-)

It's not the GNU part that's the issue here.

I mean, it's the GNU General Public License that is largely at play here. That's not the GNU part that most people refer to, but neither is it really the "Linux" kernel part that's central to the argument either.

Re: Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To

#37
post #22
post #8

Yeah this is just opportunistic PR. Oracle cares less about Open Source than even the most brain dead Red Hatter. As with all things Oracle, they are taking the angle that potentially creates a revenue opportunity for themselves. This is fine. I get it but doing it under the guise of higher open source ideals is comically transparent. Their OEL market share mostly consists of them targeting specific Red Hat accounts…

Oracle does care about open source, to the extent that they have been the top Linux kernel contributor several times. https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/oracle-is-the-1-contribu... Oracle actually does not undercut the least expensive Red Hat support offerings. Oracle Linux support is $499/year for basic, and $1,399/year for premier. Both tiers allow 24x7 access to file service requests (SRs). https://www.oracle.com…

It takes people a long time to readjust preconceptions. Microsoft was the big bad for most of my life, but it took ~8 years after Ballmerś retirement for people to start noticing Microsoftś prestigious opensourcing, interesting cloud offerings etc. where itś now a commonplace that they've improved. Fascinating really.

Oracleś got quite the history, but they have been supporting Linux and Java well and killing Solaris was a segue into Linux too, ergo more open.

Re: Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To

#38
post #22
post #8

Yeah this is just opportunistic PR. Oracle cares less about Open Source than even the most brain dead Red Hatter. As with all things Oracle, they are taking the angle that potentially creates a revenue opportunity for themselves. This is fine. I get it but doing it under the guise of higher open source ideals is comically transparent. Their OEL market share mostly consists of them targeting specific Red Hat accounts…

Oracle does care about open source, to the extent that they have been the top Linux kernel contributor several times. https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/oracle-is-the-1-contribu... Oracle actually does not undercut the least expensive Red Hat support offerings. Oracle Linux support is $499/year for basic, and $1,399/year for premier. Both tiers allow 24x7 access to file service requests (SRs). https://www.oracle.com…

They care so much for open source that they instantly killed OpenSolaris even if that led to much of the team quitting.

They also very much care to create an open and competitive environment, that's why their reps repeatedly refused to sell us licenses to have Solaris run under VMWare ESXi, demanding we replace our ESXi deployments with... VirtualBox (no, really).

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