Oracle dumps Terraform for OpenTofu

> Having these pretuned AND having a dedicated support team doing the tuning Dedicated support team costs a lot more than you think. I guess you never had to deal with Oracle support. If you get hold of someone, all they will do it point to the documentation.

All software products have documentation on how to install the product. Oracle has a large suite of products, their databases, ERPs, etc. For kernel parameters, its just a file, which takes a second https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/1...

In reality though, all Infra teams, have infrastructure to install OS (and manage the fleet), then post-install customize the OS to which team is requesting, usually done via puppet or ansible to manage the configuration. There will be standardized configuration for application, web, database (just to keep it simple).

I would be shocked if Oracle support (or any other vendor) is given login access to make changes on servers owned by clients. At best, you open a case, you get an incompetent support person who'll send you documentation.

Oracle support does not replace admins. Oracle support gives you access to bug fixes, updates, documentation. I believe you can download most Oracle software for free, but without the docs and updates, its worthless. Other vendors may use the opposite strategy, docs openly available but software downloads are paid/subscriptions.

> Spending $500k/yr on compute+support SLA is cheaper than $200k/yr on compute and hiring 3 admins dedicated to that piece of compute.

In reality though, there will always be admins, then a whole lot DevOps/Cloud Ops/Kubernetes/SRE/etc people added, smooth talking manager/director increasing the spend from what could be done on bare-metal under 20K to a 20 million dollar multi cloud strategy. Why have 3 admins report to you, when you can have an army of 200 people do the same work for 100x more cost? Success stories and promotions all around!

> Citation is sorely needed for both "transition"

Sure! [1]

> The Business Source License requires the work to be relicensed to a "Change License" at the "Change Date". The "Change License" must be a "license which is compatible with GPL version 2.0 or later". The Change Date must be four years or sooner from the publication date of the work being licensed

So the business source license is less "non-OSI" and more "not currently non-OSI, but eventually and irrevocable at future date".

In the case of Terraform it says [2]:

>Change Date: Four years from the date the Licensed Work is published.

>Change License: MPL 2.0

So is this ideal? No. But it's better than OpenVMS screwing over historians and hobbyists [3] decades after it's relevancy has expired.[6]

It's also better than SSPL [4] which has no such transition and stays permanently non-OSI [5].

> "BSL XP be good for wine" claims above.

Well Wine uses the LGPL, and Windows XP was released in 2001 so even if they set the expiry 20 years after release, it'd be GPL'd by now.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Source_License#Terms

[2] https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/blob/main/LICENSE

[3] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/09/vsi_prunes_hobbyist_p...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Public_License

[5] https://web.archive.org/web/20230411163802/https://lists.ope...

[6] https://www.theregister.com/2013/06/10/openvms_death_notice/

And the biggest department:

* Oracle legal

> all Infra teams, have infrastructure to install OS (and manage the fleet), then post-install customize the OS to which team is requesting, usually done via puppet or ansible to manage the configuration.

Yep! And it takes time and effort to maintain your Puppet/Chef/Ansible/Terraform/OpenTofu scripts as well as your golden images as well as triaging escalations as well as other incidental work. This means you don't have as much time to work on tuning or debugging, because you'll have dozens of tools (some in-house, others purchased) to manage.

Furthermore, most people recognize Hardware specialized IT Administration is increasingly a career dead end, so most end up switching to Engineering, Sales Engineering, or Support Engineering due to better career opportunities.

> I would be shocked if Oracle support (or any other vendor) is given login access to make changes on servers owned by clients. At best, you open a case, you get an incompetent support person who'll send you documentation.

This is the norm in most mid- and upper-market support contracts. You'll have a dedicated TAM, Support Eng, and CSM who will handhold teams, and will have access to the underlying infrastructure.

> Oracle support does not replace admins. Oracle support gives you access to bug fixes, updates, documentation. I believe you can download most Oracle software for free, but without the docs and updates, its worthless. Other vendors may use the opposite strategy, docs openly available but software downloads are paid/subscriptions.

Depending on your contract, you would be given a dedicated TAM team and support team to debug any issues in the Oracle stack.

> In reality though, there will always be admins, then a whole lot DevOps/Cloud Ops/Kubernetes/SRE/etc people added, smooth talking manager/director increasing the spend from what could be done on bare-metal under 20K to a 20 million dollar multi cloud strategy. Why have 3 admins report to you, when you can have an army of 200 people do the same work for 100x more cost? Success stories and promotions all around!

That "smooth-talking manager" needs to justify to the CFO, COO, CTO, VP Eng, etc that for $X spent, I can get 1.5 * $X back.

As I've mentioned on multiple different occasions on HN, spend on on-prem infra is treated as part of the Finance+ITOps budget, not the DevOps budget (which is generally within R&D).

Procurement is hard, and you need to JUSTIFY a 1% increase in headcount

For example, let's assume you are hiring 3 IT Admins for $120k. That ends up costing $700-800k/yr because of benefits and incidentals. The compute as well is an additional $200-300k.

This means you are spending $900k/yr AT BEST.

That $200-300k in compute becomes $500k with a support contract, and you can hire 1 person for $120k to manage that.

This means you're spending around $750k/yr AT BEST.

That extra $150K can then be given to Engineering to help give bonuses to attract good dev talent or hire some additional headcount on the Sales side to sell the product you are hired to build.

It's important to remember that a community is not a single minded entity. It's members can hold many contradicting beliefs, while each individual is ideologically consistent.

This shouldn't be unexpected and it's not an excuse to be dismissive to an imagined hypocrite. Not saying there aren't hypocrites in this world, just that we shouldn't treat members of a community as some kind of superset of everything in that community.