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Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"

linux.oracle.com

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Re: Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"

#111

Post by russell »

bdunbar wrote: post #79
nodata wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know we all like to think that corporations are evil and the presence of corporate interests actually messes stuff up. But Oracle actually is evil . > But this really is one case where you want the oomph of bilion-dollar company making sure that you get your security updates in time. Don't be naive, Oracle wouldn't be doing this if they didn't see a substantial business advantage. > No one else is providing that.…

But Oracle actually is evil. Evil is stomping a kitten to death. Evil is the gulag, the concentration camp, the cultural revolution. Oracle is just a business.

Businesses can be evil. Crushing your competition via patents is evil. Damaging others way out of proportion to your own gain is evil. Buying elections with a flood of money is evil. The Libor scandal is evil because it screwed millions of contracts. Stomping a kitten is pretty tame by comparison.

Re: Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"

#112

Post by cloudyjoe »

bdunbar wrote: post #79
nodata wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know we all like to think that corporations are evil and the presence of corporate interests actually messes stuff up. But Oracle actually is evil . > But this really is one case where you want the oomph of bilion-dollar company making sure that you get your security updates in time. Don't be naive, Oracle wouldn't be doing this if they didn't see a substantial business advantage. > No one else is providing that.…

But Oracle actually is evil. Evil is stomping a kitten to death. Evil is the gulag, the concentration camp, the cultural revolution. Oracle is just a business.

An example of software-industry practices by Oracle: After Oracle bought ATG (e-commerce software vendor), they assigned an engineer to remove the code that detected and limited the number of concurrent users. ATG software is licensed by the number of concurrent users, and had for a long-time a mechanism to limit usage to the actual number of licenses for that specific customer. Oracle removed the limit code so that some customers would unwittingly exceed their licensed number. The intent was that these customers could be targeted by Oracle's license police, who'd extract high financial penalties.

A hard-nosed business decision. Potentially lucrative, profitable. Not illegal. But demonstrating utter contempt and manipulation of their customers. If this is how Oracle treats its own customers, how do you think they treat competitors like CentOS and the OSS community?

Re: Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"

#113

Post by zeruch »

Frankly, given how well they've managed every other FOSS element in their charge, I have no doubt that this is not only NOT a "better" alternative to CentOS (disclosure: I have no particular love for CentOS, but you do know what you are getting with them up front...your releases will be slow, a little far from bleeding edge, but deliberate and solid) and likely has some kind of business booby-trap attached.

Re: Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"

#114

Post by skorgu »

wdaher wrote: post #73
vtanase wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the exact same feeling that I'm getting from this announcement. To me this just feels like a publicity stunt, where Oracle is aiming to get a slice of the CentOS/RHEL market with very little investment. As far as I'm concerned this isn't even a valid attempt on their behalf to earn the trust of the Open Source Community. Taking something that already works and touting your own horn about how you can provide f…

I was trying to go for a "for linux nerds, by linux nerds" vibe, so I'm amused that your complaint is "This doesn't sound corporate enough". At the end of the day, my view here is that Oracle has actually produced something useful, but lots of people are blind to it, in no small part because of what ultimately boils down to zealotry (which doesn't seem like an awesome reason to me). Hence the point of trying to get t…

Look, with all due respect we're not blind to it. I'm sure Oracle Linux is a fine piece of software, I bet it's just as good as RHEL and I'll even spot you that your support team is equally good as Red Hat's. We do not have technical objections to the work you've done.

We simply don't trust your employer to behave with anything even approaching good faith in any interaction. What happened to Solaris alone is a huge warning flag, those of us who have interacted with Oracle in a professional capacity have...more reasons to believe this.

Re: Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"

#115

Post by peterwwillis »

pgeorgi wrote: post #88
wdaher wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was trying to go for a "for linux nerds, by linux nerds" vibe, so I'm amused that your complaint is "This doesn't sound corporate enough". At the end of the day, my view here is that Oracle has actually produced something useful, but lots of people are blind to it, in no small part because of what ultimately boils down to zealotry (which doesn't seem like an awesome reason to me). Hence the point of trying to get t…

Not zealotry: bad experience. Your plug for faster updates, for example: Security updates for Solaris used to be free. So while I know that Oracle is large enough to host many different philosophies in many different departments, what Oracle has done to the former Sun departments really makes me wary of trusting any free offers by Oracle.

Exactly right. I know of several mid- and large-scale companies that replaced (or are replacing) all of their Sun Solaris infrastructure as soon as they heard Oracle acquired them, because of their bad experiences with Oracle.

And from a technical perspective, if the OS is managed anything like the database or client tools, I wouldn't touch it with a 1000ft pole.

Re: Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"

#116

Post by krschultz »

wdaher wrote: post #16
cagenut wrote: post #12

I've run 200+ server environments on centos4, a 40+ server cluster on centos5, and now run a 50+ server cluster on rhel6. I'm pretty much dead on their target audience here. This seems almost mean. Its a billion dollar company calling out a volunteer group of a couple of guys for being slower than them. Part of the reason I switched to rhel was exactly this graph, I didn't have a lot of faith in centos as a going con…

(Disclaimer: I had a hand in a lot of this) That's not quite the intent. Look, here's the deal: I know we all like to think that corporations are evil and the presence of corporate interests actually messes stuff up. But this really is one case where you want the oomph of bilion-dollar company making sure that you get your security updates in time. No one else is providing that. Oracle happens to be doing so, and we'…

I don't think corporations are evil. In fact, I bet most people on HN don't think that.

We do want big companies behind the Linux ecosystem. There are already many out there (Red Hat, Canonical, among them) doing just that.

So if I have a budget for paying for a Linux distro, where do I want my money to go? Red Hat, Oracle, or Canonical? In my mind I'm ranking them

1. Canonical 2. Red Hat 3. everyone else in the world 4. Oracle

You need to fix that perception before Oracle Linux will go anywhere. Freatures won't do it. You could offer free support for a year and I wouldn't do it.

At the end of the day, most of us know that the value out of a 'support' contract isn't really the support. It's knowing that the product will continue forward. So who do I want my budget to fund?

Re: Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"

#117

Post by tlogan »

I know that 'hackers news' folks (Google employees?) don't like Oracle, the enterprise IT world does trust Oracle. They trust Oracle much more than they trusts Google (not hard).

From outside, neutral point of view, all these corporations Oracle, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. are equally "evil" - especially from point of view of Open Source community. Am I wrong here?

Re: Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"

#118

Post by sciurus »

mmmooo wrote: post #87
sciurus wrote: post #33

The advantage of Oracle Linux that I see is the newer supported kernel version, On both Oracle Linux 5 and 6 you get 3.0, compared to 2.6.18 for RHEL5 and 2.6.32 for RHEL6.

Are you sure about this? the public repo seems to show 2.6.18/2.6.32.. This would actually be a dis-advantage in many cases, as a number of vendor utils (I'm looking at you HP) don't play nice w/ 3.x kernels.

They have the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK), as well as a RHEL-compatible kernel. I'm not sure which is the default in new installs.

https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/entry/oracle_unbreakable_ente...

Re: Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"

#119

Post by wickedchicken »

wdaher wrote: post #73
vtanase wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the exact same feeling that I'm getting from this announcement. To me this just feels like a publicity stunt, where Oracle is aiming to get a slice of the CentOS/RHEL market with very little investment. As far as I'm concerned this isn't even a valid attempt on their behalf to earn the trust of the Open Source Community. Taking something that already works and touting your own horn about how you can provide f…

I was trying to go for a "for linux nerds, by linux nerds" vibe, so I'm amused that your complaint is "This doesn't sound corporate enough". At the end of the day, my view here is that Oracle has actually produced something useful, but lots of people are blind to it, in no small part because of what ultimately boils down to zealotry (which doesn't seem like an awesome reason to me). Hence the point of trying to get t…

The press release has a very us-vs-them mentality that I have seen about 0% other distributions do.

Re: Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"

#120

Post by wdaher »

davidmr wrote: post #98
wdaher wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was trying to go for a "for linux nerds, by linux nerds" vibe, so I'm amused that your complaint is "This doesn't sound corporate enough". At the end of the day, my view here is that Oracle has actually produced something useful, but lots of people are blind to it, in no small part because of what ultimately boils down to zealotry (which doesn't seem like an awesome reason to me). Hence the point of trying to get t…

I'm trying very hard to be as neutral as possible (as opposed to "Oracle bad. Raaaaar!"), but I've been part of the HPC community for a long time, and Oracle has done their best to tell us that we don't matter at all to them (Grid Engine, Lustre, etc.). I understand that the margins on HPC aren't great, so I don't necessarily fault them, but it leaves a very bad taste. That's just one community of many who feel like…

There's a ton to talk about in the "Why Oracle Linux and not RHEL" department, but I'm not trying to sell you anything, so I want to set that aside for now. (I have to say, though, even the "big price tag" is significantly smaller than RHEL's).

Instead, I want to look at the following case: you're a sysadmin running CentOS. You don't pay anyone for support, and you have no intention of ever doing so.

There, I think the benefits are, in brief, the things you're able to achieve when you have large-scale resources: timely releases and better QA, while maintaining 100% RHEL compatibility. Basically "what you love about CentOS", minus "what you hate about CentOS".

But yes, it comes from Oracle :)

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