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Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"
201–210 of 221 posts
Re: Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so? You guys are providing a script to switch from CentOS to OL, but I don't see a comparable script to switch back to CentOS. Where is the script to easily switch back when Oracle decides to screw everyone over as many have already brought up?
druiid: If that happens, I will personally help you switch back any systems you switched over this way :) My email address is in my profile. As for everyone else, yeah, a '--reverse' was somewhere in our set of desired features for the script, but ultimately this became about some combination of "Launch early, launch often" and "MVP", two topics I know we all love here :)
Can we get that in writing and approved by Oracles legal department? Or is this some kind of personal guarantee, if so can you please spell if out exactly. Thanks. Also is it for druiid only, or the community as a whole?
Re: Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, FUD then.
No, not FUD...not really. Solaris is a complicated tale. The short explanation is that when Oracle acquired Sun, all of the hopes and dreams of Solaris users, particularly OpenSolaris users, were dashed. Many great technologies were pushed onto the back burner. All of Sun's Open Source portfolio saw a massive shake up and very little came out the other side healthier. Pre-acquisition, Solaris/OpenSolaris was a reason…
I am a long-term SunOS/Solaris user (~20 years) and what killed Solaris is they neglected Solx86 for years for fear of cannibalizing SPARC sales. What happened was devs got Linux boxes to replace SPARCstations (using them as cheap X servers) then x86 and x64 got good enough for servers, and everyone ditched Solaris in order to get onto the commodity hardware (Linux wasn't really a factor in this decision, it just happened to be the dominant Unix on that hardware at the time, could easily have been FreeBSD). Thanks to Microsoft and their NT pretensions, supporting hardware vendors (e.g. storage) were manufacturing compatible kit too. It didn't help that Sun managed to forget that they were a business, and a hardware business at that. Giving stuff away to drive sales is a proven strategy, but no-one was buying SPARCs. Turns out it was cheaper to buy PCs and accept failures and workaround them, than to buy a "real" server that wouldn't fail and if it did, you could hot-swap anything. Call it the Google method.
Sun could have had a compelling desktop-to-datacentre story, all Solaris, on Intel PCs all the way to SPARC near-mainframes. But they succumbed to short term thinking and killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. The alternative to the Oracle acquisition was for them to go the way of SGI...
Re: Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I am quite familiar with ATG, having worked with the product since 2001. I don't believe that Oracle removed the license limitation on purpose, but rather to make ATG consistent with their other products which you can download, install and develop with, but as soon as you use them for production you have to pay.
You also have to factor in that ATG's old licensing department was chronically incapable of delivering the correct license files: they used to send out production licences for the wrong IP addresses, session limitations or bad expiration dates, and it wasn't uncommon to have 3 or 4 runarounds with them in order to have what you paid for.
That said, I'm not looking forward to use Oracle Linux in any of our production servers, unless my clients specifically asks for it and pays for the support. And this support has to be of very high quality, it will take me just one canned reply to put CentOS back in.
Re: Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
(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'…
Anyone decrying Oracle as "evil" is falling into a trap that I have warned about[1]: they are making the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison -- they are infusing Oracle with humanity that it does not in fact have. Oracle is, as another commenter put it, a corporate sociopath. The inability to empathize is fine for a monopolist (and indeed, it's a terrific asset -- and after five months of working there, I con…
>they are infusing Oracle with humanity that it does not in fact have.
Corporations are people too, you insensitive clod!
Re: Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"
#206Earlier 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.…
It's quite possible, that, being a huge company, they do a lot of bad crap (they are not high on my list), but there are some good people there trying to do good things.
The Nazi party had some good people trying to do good things too. Just sayin'.
Re: Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You're completely warped view on life warrants serious psychiatric help. And surprised that you think defending patents is evil because almost every major IT company right now is doing that.
>And surprised that you think defending patents is evil because almost every major IT company right now is doing that.
If all the sheep walk off the cliff then it's the right thing to do!
Re: Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
As long as we're noticing how you guys sold out, I'd like to bring up the Ksplice blog. It used to have some really interesting stuff on there, but after the move to Oracle, the interesting posts disappeared. I'm talking specifically about 'Coffee shop internet access'. Man that was a cool post and it taught my brother and I a LOT. Then it disappeared, along with most mirrors of it. I was able to find one left, here:…
And with this they posted it. It seems like a time issue, not Oracle censoring a 'hacking' post. And now I feel a bit like a cynical doofus. https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/entry/coffee_shop_internet_...
Yeah, getting these posts back up has largely been a casualty of our lack of resources, not any sort of coordinated malicious plot against them. But we're glad you like 'em! (and I think your comment was the little bit of kick we needed to just go and bring it back.)
Re: Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
druiid: If that happens, I will personally help you switch back any systems you switched over this way :) My email address is in my profile. As for everyone else, yeah, a '--reverse' was somewhere in our set of desired features for the script, but ultimately this became about some combination of "Launch early, launch often" and "MVP", two topics I know we all love here :)
Can we get that in writing and approved by Oracles legal department? Or is this some kind of personal guarantee, if so can you please spell if out exactly. Thanks. Also is it for druiid only, or the community as a whole?
That offer is for druiid only :), but --reverse is in the works.
(And seriously, editing the script and hacking together a quick reverse is pretty easy, but I just want to make sure we take the time to get it right in all the annoying little edge cases that inevitably crop up.)
Re: Oracle launches "a better alternative to CentOS"
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
(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 worl…
>I don't think corporations are evil. In fact, I bet most people on HN don't think that.
I don't think that anything is evil per se, but I do think that corporations and modern businesses are defective by design. Why are they defective? Several reasons.
A) They are frequently more populous than can be effectively managed (also see: Dunbar's number).
B) They are unethical by design since money can be made by simply throwing money in a particular direction. This make no fucking sense whatsoever. Imagine if money didn't exist and we only had physical goods. It would be the equivalent of having 100 logs, putting them on a particular patch of ground then ending up with 200 logs a week later. This just makes no sense.
C) The are unethical by design since the wage gap is huge and the scenario is essentially that many hundreds or thousands of people are working to make a tiny minority extremely rich. It ain't slavery, Bob, but it sure as fuck smells like it.
C part deux) They are unethical by design because when a worker creates something, it is by default not his. Common sense dictates that what comes from your hands belongs to you. The rules of business are such that what comes from thousands of peoples' hands belongs to one person. If there was ever a scam...!
D) The purpose of the business is to ensure it's own survival. A more enlightened approach would be a business which ensures the parent society's survival. This makes more sense because when an entire society flourishes, so do all the businesses contained in it. When a single business flourishes, other businesses and, by extension, parts of society will suffer for it. In other words, the world ain't zero sum and modern business practices do not appear to take this into account.