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

oracle.com

61–70 of 142 posts

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

#61
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…

How Oracle handles Java (business-wise, not in technological terms) is one of the things that tells me that Oracle is still the toxic company it's always been.

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

#62
post #52
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's up with the way you write the letter s? Is it a catch-all for apostrophes? I haven't seen anyone do that before, just curious.

On some keyboard layouts, pressing the quote mark starts a modifyer and then depending on the layout the following character is combined with the quote mark. Most English layouts don't include ś in this, but some Eastern European (?) languages use that character more often and so include them in this modifyer shortcut.

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

#64
> Finally, to IBM, here’s a big idea for you. You say that you don’t want to pay all those RHEL developers? Here’s how you can save money: just pull from us. Become a downstream distributor of Oracle Linux. We will happily take on the burden.

Not only is this a brilliant troll, it's also true. Oracle could easily take this on if it's such a burden for IBM.

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

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big tech companies have a history of supporting the community where doing so attacks their competitors’ cash cows. There’s also that Oracle linux was formed from RHEL. Maybe let’s not confuse Oracle undermining their competitor’s moat with their genuinely being on the side of the community. It’s been a while, but the necessity of MariaDB and Percona also seem to show that Oracle’s been very much on the other side of…

> Maybe let’s not confuse Oracle undermining their competitor’s moat with their genuinely being on the side of the community. Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons (Oracle) is better than doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons (IBM).

True, but doing the right thing for the wrong reasons doesn't mean that the company should be praised for it.

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

#67
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…

> Oracle does care about open source, to the extent that they have been the top Linux kernel contributor several times.

Linux kernel is not entirety of Linux. Given that there is Oracle cloud and various hardware Oracle has to support, it will be almost unthinkable if Oracle did not contribute to Linux kernel.

But - I will be interested in Oracle's support for broader Linux ecosystem. How about contributions to GCC, Gnome (or any other DE as a matter of fact), Wayland/xorg etc? Oracle strictly contributes to projects from which it can benefit immediately.

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

#68
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…

Couldn’t agree with this more—though I wasn’t a fan of their lawsuit against Google for how Java was used in Android.

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

#69

Ok maybe Oracle has a point here looking past their reputation. Did you know Sun had a Mac mini like product back in the day based on dual UltraSPARC T2+ Coolthreads SoCs? I almost bought it off eBay https://twitter.com/R_I_C_M/status/1646236005471485968 https://twitter.com/alanc/status/1585752213565018114 Wouldn’t it be nice if Oracle brought that back and made the ultimate open source dev box? Their latest SPARC pr…

They also had the very cool Cobalt RAQ's.

Nowadays, such a dev-focused box (instead of a mini do-it-all server) might be structured like the Mac Mini.

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

#70
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…

I agree with your blind hatred of Oracle. But you have to admit, this is pretty epic inter-company trolling, and what Oracle says in its post is basically right.
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