Oracle responds to Red Hat
Oracle weighing in on anything open source related is peak hypocrisy. Fuck Oracle. They’re not our friends.
Yeah seriously. It’s in their best interests to continue to ride on top of Redhat’s work. Do not believe for a second that if they were in Redhat’s position, they wouldn’t do the exact same thing.
As much as I dislike Oracle, they’ve been pretty good stewards of the Java open source project, and haven’t had any issues with anyone else rebadging the JDK, whether it be Zulu, BellSoft, Amazon, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, etc.
If anything, I’d like to see them put their money where their mouth is and hire Linux devs to continue Oracle Linux in an open manner.
they’ve been pretty good stewards of the Java open source project
I am pretty sure Google (the company itself) would say otherwise.
They’ve also been pretty horrible stewards of VirtualBox.
Oracle is not friends with open source. To be honest, I trust RedHat over Oracle and that’s saying something.
If anything, I’d like to see them put their money where their mouth is and hire Linux devs to continue Oracle Linux in an open manner.
Oracle Linux is already open: https://yum.oracle.com/. ISOs and full sources are freely downloadable, you don’t even need to create an account, and the Oracle Linux license explicitly states that you retain all your open source rights to any open source software distributed as part of Oracle Linux. I suppose it would be possible for Oracle to change their license to make it more akin to Red Hat’s and thus make Oracle Linux less free, but there’s been no sign of Oracle looking to do that.
Oracle also definitely has lots of Linux devs. They even throw some shade at IBM in the post:
By the way, if you are a Linux developer who disagrees with IBM’s actions and you believe in Linux freedom the way we do, we are hiring.
They need those Linux devs because all of Oracle Cloud and Oracle Exadata are built on Oracle Linux, and Oracle tests their main cash cow Oracle Database exclusively on Oracle Linux. I think that last point is actually the reason that Oracle Linux even exists. I don’t think Oracle cares too much about owning the OS layer, they want to be able to support their Database product on an OS that the majority of their customers are using without having to pay a tax to the OS vendor.
I also work on a product that has to interoperate with RHEL, and I also want my company to be able to test our product without having to pay a tax to Red Hat. I’m quite happy to see this blog post from Oracle because it shows that our aims are aligned and it means we’ve got an 800 lb. gorilla on our side of the line. Entirely possible Oracle could turn around and do the same things, but I’ve got no compunctions about cheering them on while our aims coincide.
Why do you think it would? Oracle rebranding RHEL and selling it as their own distro in direct competition with Red Hat is no doubt the biggest reason they made this change in the first place
They could just charge for-profit companies instead.
There would be ways to get around that, but then again, there are ways to get around the current implementation too
Even ORACLE is calling out Red Hat.
Who’s next, Apple?
Currently testing Debian in a VM, I have lots of files so I need to set everything straight before I switch.
I suppose Apple uses Linux in some of their servers, so maybe. But their desktop product is Darwin so I don’t think that’s getting any votes
Indeed, but with that kind of licensing there’s nothing stopping them. We already found limitations of GPL with RedHat, I think all of these licenses need an overhaul
This is hilarious considering one of the main reasons IBM is clamping down on RHEL is because they are literally taking RHEL, changed the stickers to “Oracle” and calls it a day to sell their own propietary shit. Of course they are against RedHat closing down RHEL, they need it to compile Oracle Linux.
I don’t like what RedHat is doing (or IBM, however you want to see it) but cheering for Oracle on this particular issue is just wrong
What I don’t understand is: who is using oracle linux? Never heard of a single person or company using it?
One must be really far from linux to choose oracle linux among hundreds of available distros
Anyone who uses Oracle Cloud is either directly or indirectly using Oracle Linux. Oracle Cloud is ~2% of the cloud market, so it’s small compared to the big three (AWS ~32%, Azure ~23%, GCP ~10% according to this report) but 2% of a very big market (~$237 billion total estimated for 2023) is still a significant user base.
From my own work, most of the Oracle Cloud adoption I see appears to be driven by favourable prices for Exadata Cloud as compared to purchasing on-prem Exadata hardware. Oracle Linux is also baked into Exadata “Cloud-at-Customer”, which has essentially the same cloud control plane but the hardware and all data lives on-prem at the customer’s site. That seems fairly popular with customers who want Exadata performance but can’t allow their data to leave their premises for security reasons.
What I don’t understand is: who is using oracle linux? Never heard of a single person or company using it?
One must be really far from linux to choose oracle linux among hundreds of available distros
Me neither. And I always wondered why you wouldn’t just go directly to the source and go with RedHat for enterprise usecases. Perhaps cheaper support contracts?
We struggled with red hat because our product is usually in airgapped installations. We know how many we’ve sold, but we don’t know how many are still in use.
Say a customer buys one unit. Then 5 years later, they replace it. And 5 years on, they replace it again. On the books that’s 3 sold. We don’t know that two were retired, we don’t know these are all the same installation. So red hat wants us to pay 3 annual licences for this, and those licences don’t end until we can prove the installation was retired. The costs effectively snowball indefinitely.
We wanted to pay - it was the easiest route to certain federal qualifications. But we couldn’t come to an agreement on how to pay.
It would be corporate clients that are already all on Oracle for their careers. I’ve met guys that have built their entire career on Oracle and if you suggest any other software they’ll try to politically assassinate you. Some people just care about money not the work they do.
Oracle doing what they’re doing is literally explicitly and intentionally permitted under the licensing of the Linux kernel.
It’s not abusing anything. It’s the purpose of the license.
If we’re going about what’s technically permitted, then RedHat is also permitted to change licence, close it down and stop any new versions from being open or free. All their development goes into the upstream so I don’t even know what Oracle is trying to say here. Except “we want open access to RHEL, not just upstream sources like CentOS”.
By the way, if you are a Linux developer who disagrees with IBM’s actions and you believe in Linux freedom the way we do, we are hiring.
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If they are so keen on GPL, why dont they re license ZFS from its current GPL clashing license that stops it from getting Integrated into Linux kernel source code…
