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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

#71

Post by JohnFen »

redroyal wrote: post #19

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…

> Wouldn’t it be nice if Oracle brought that back and made the ultimate open source dev box?

That would be irrelevant to me. If Oracle is involved, I don't want to touch it with a 10-foot pole.

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

#73

Post by chasil »

Aloha wrote: post #43
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think like, a big part of this was Solaris has near zero chance of gaining headshare among people who need Unix. Solaris has value for customers with vendor lock in, and its a declining revenue source which can be ridden out for a decade or two, and then discontinued.

I don't think that awaits Solaris.

The Rdb database for OpenVMS is still getting updates, and a new port to the VMS-x86 release that has recently emerged.

https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/rdb.htm...

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

#74

Post by stcroixx »

whartung wrote: post #32
evan1107 wrote: 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…

If my choices for Linux end up IBM or Oracle, I’ll pick Oracle.

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

#75

Post by pengaru »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #60
pengaru wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBF Linux put OpenSolaris on life support, with RedHat's help. Oracle just pulled the plug.

That's exactly right; I was surprised way back when that Linux wasn't cutting into the Windows marketshare very much at all, despite all the noise and fury coming from Redmond, but it was absolutely decimating big iron UNIX.

Windows was already on low-margin consumer x86 boxes so there wasn't the same opportunity.

Linux enabled commodity hardware to eat Big Iron's lunch using that same x86. Dell and IBM certainly made a good business filling datacenter racks with their x86 offerings for quite some time.

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

#76

Post by delfinom »

mighmi wrote: post #37
chasil wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oracle has got the history and continues the same history, including the lawyers. You know why? The entire business is a cult structured around their majority owner, Larry who has never stepped away from the business.

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

#77

Post by delfinom »

JohnFen wrote: post #61
whartung wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They also buried a call home into the VBox Guest Extensions and eventually started sending legal demands to companies as well. Because while VBox was open license, the VBox Guest Extensions have a non-commercial use license by default but that doesn't stop VBox from asking you to install them innocently on the first run.

Also 3 years ago, the guy in charge of a Oracle database we had (now migrated to MSSQL) accidentally downloaded the wrong Oracle database software from their portal. It turns out Oracle just lets you download any variant in their portal and then just send you legal demands for payment when you accidentally use a higher tier than you licensed. Something they can absolutely fix themselves to prevent. Of course we told them to fuck off since we didn't use any feature specific to the other tier and deployed the correct variant.

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

#78

Post by IceWreck »

> 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.

100% PR. They know Red Hat will not actually do it so why not offer for PR points.

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

#79

Post by aidenn0 »

chasil wrote: post #42
evan1107 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oracle does maintain Solaris, which would seem to me to entail a much larger support burden than Red Hat's stewardship of their enterprise Linux distribution. Oracle also ships a few Linux userspace utilities outside of the main yum repos; the btrfs utilities come to mind. There really isn't any obvious btrfs performance need within Oracle or its products, which runs contrary to the spirit of your observations; in fa…

> Oracle does maintain Solaris, which would seem to me to entail a much larger support burden than Red Hat's stewardship of their enterprise Linux distribution.

This seems like a non-sequitur in a conversation about open-source OSes.

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

#80

Post by timbit42 »

stcroixx wrote: post #74
whartung wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If my choices for Linux end up IBM or Oracle, I’ll pick Oracle.

You will have more than two options so there is no need to choose either of those two.
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