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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.
Of course they would! Corporations do what’s in their best interests. Corporations gonna corporate.
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.
Anybody that thinks Oracle has been good stewards of the open source community, is completely whacked. They have not. I’ll trust RH over Oracle as well.
Oh wow, I had blocked out the virtual box guest additions debacle/shake-down from my memory. It almost felt like entrapment, the way they went about it.
I’m out of the loop here, what happened?
VirtualBox is free and open source, the windows guest additions piece is not. However, they’re both available for free download from the same site and they do not make any distinction between those two (at least at the time, haven’t looked). They were waiting for companies to download the guest additions piece and going after them to shake down licensing fees. While I don’t recall/know exactly, it seemed like they were almost exclusively going after companies they already had commercial relationships with to add more licensing fees to existing contracts. So yes, from my perspective they were shaking down customers after trying to entrap them with ambiguous free downloads. They had the legal right to do so, but it felt in bad faith.
Yeah we had to deal with that too, but are definitely not even using VirtualBox for anything. Seems like they gave up easy in our case.
Fuck oracle. They can do whatever you think it’s good about anything, but their licensing for commercial entities is horrendous and predatory.
So, once again, fuck oracle.
Red Hat is quite big contributor to Java too… and oracle isn’t good steward tbh…
But if their vote changes RedHat’s mind I don’t really care
I had to read that again as I thought it was someone telling that to Oracle, which would make WAY more sense.
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.
Not because Oracle likes open source, but because they like to profit from RedHat’s hard work.
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
Their desktop product is a stolen BSD.
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
Note that they still share code for much of Darwin, even where the license does not require it: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions
True, but from what I hear, the dumps don’t really help much. Better than nothing, I suppose
If they wanted their code to be sharealike, the developers could have chosen a different license. Apple is contributing more than is required so don’t complain?
The point is Apple doesn’t actually want to help the community - they might be hoping that someone goes through their dumps and finds a vulnerability and reports it to them. Free community sourced labour.
If they really wanted to help, MacOS should have been GPLv3. But we know that’s not how Apple functions.
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
Mostly their Oracle Database customers (which aren’t few), I suppose. There are many which will fire up a Oracle Linux vm on their servers to install Oracle database, mostly because its “easier” and Oracle gives some support for those.
A lot of company behind the scence do, with Oracle DB… even there are RHEL, they opt to use OL because it’s free, and they only need to pay the DB License…
Free estate
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
One must be really far from linux to choose oracle linux among hundreds of available distros
Not really a choice when the products they sell (their database/cloud solutions) are tied to it or RHEL. But yeah, I doubt there’s many who’d call it their favorite distro
If you’re using a software suite that requires Oracle Database, it and RHEL are safe options. It’s used where I work for that reason, but only relating to said software. This vendor only officially supports those 2 distros, and to a lesser extent Windows.
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.
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.
Ah ic, thanks for sharing your experience! So which RHEL derivative did you end up going with?
Rocky for now, but I can’t say that’s set in stone
Rocky still walkaround using UBI source, and it’s open, so in the end it’s 99.99% compatible with RHEL.
Just fuck CIQ with their contract…
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My company was starting to use OEL extensively over the past few months.
Now now, calling Oracle a downstream RHEL is straight up lying. We need sincere comments.
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”.
No they aren’t. Not unless they remove all the GPL code from their software.
It’s the entire purpose of the GPL. You can never own derivative code.
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.
🤨
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…
You know it’s bad when Oracle starts taking potshots. Fuck em’ both – I’m not about to forget about that API nonsense – but I’m just pleased to see blood in the water.
They’re only saying this because it hurts them. They just take RHEL and rebadge it as Oracle Linux and now they can’t do it as easily.
Same as CIQ as Parent company of Rocky Linux…
Cheering for Oracle is certainly an unexpected turn of events, but here we are. They are absolutely right that
RedHatIBM’s motivations are simply to kill competition and obtain vendor lock-in by ending RHEL compatibility. RedHat is truly dead.Cheering for Oracle is certainly an unexpected turn of events, but here we are.
Oracle is literally freeloading RHEL without giving anything back. If they were an active Fedora and CentOS contributor, I would have sympathy but they are not.
RedHat is truly dead.
Red Hat is (at the moment at least) still the biggest FOSS supporter around. Oracle’s behavior makes clear that they have absolutely no interest in picking up contributions in upstream FOSS community projects.
lol “competition”. Oracle doesn’t contribute 1/10th that Red Hat does to open source. This whole controversy is BECAUSE of Oracle copying Red Hat’s homework with OEL. Now they are pissed because they can’t have a free lunch anymore at Red Hat’s expense.
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.
We live in a weird reality lol
I’ll never use an Oracle product and IBM is a soulless corporation. Debian is a much better product anyway but they’re missing some of the really good enterprise features that Red Hat has. I hope at some point they have solutions for Satellite and IDM.
While oracle has definitely always been… problematic, it is refreshing to see something actually written by a real, rational person. It may just be corporate fodder, but it’s good for people in this case, something very rare - just like SUSE’s not-so-subtle PR statements.
Screw RH.
Sure, corporations gonna corporate, capitalism sucks…
But I felt this article was written in a sincere spirit to keep Linux open and multiparty. There are obviously many more reasons for such a sentiment than just the natural urge to undress and smoke up (I know, puzzles me too). However in these times of often direct aggression to anything I know and love I welcomed it a sight for sour eyes.