Yeah this is just opportunistic PR. Oracle cares less about Open Source than even the most brain dead Red Hatter. As with all things Oracle, they are taking the angle that potentially creates a revenue opportunity for themselves. This is fine. I get it but doing it under the guise of higher open source ideals is comically transparent. Their OEL market share mostly consists of them targeting specific Red Hat accounts and severely undercutting RHEL costs (since Red Hat incurs significantly more development burden and costs) and using it as a launch pad to embed myriad other Oracle products within the customer ecosystem. Other products that conveniently aren’t grounded in their supposed open source ideals.
Oracle actually does not undercut the least expensive Red Hat support offerings. Oracle Linux support is $499/year for basic, and $1,399/year for premier. Both tiers allow 24x7 access to file service requests (SRs).
Red Hat has a more complicated support structure, starting with workstation-self support: $179, workstation-8x5 support: $299, server-self support: $349, server-8x5 support: $799, server-24x7 support: $1,299.
It would be interesting if IBM did exactly what this Oracle blog suggests:
"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."
* Oracle killed OpenOffice (after refusing to hand grant trademarks & related IP to the community until it was too late - well after LibreOffice replaced it on most distros, then dumped it on the Apache Project).
* Oracle killed Hudson (after refusing to hand grant trademarks & related IP to the community until it was too late - well after Jenkins had replaced it on the market, then dumped it on the Apache Project).
* Oracle attempted to make case law such that APIs fall under copyright. Oracle appealed Google v. Oracle all the way up to SCOTUS. Since countless open source projects are re-implement proprietary APIs (e.g. S3 protocol, Wine/Proton), and adverse ruling would have been catastrophic.
They care so much for open source that they instantly killed OpenSolaris even if that led to much of the team quitting.
They also very much care to create an open and competitive environment, that's why their reps repeatedly refused to sell us licenses to have Solaris run under VMWare ESXi, demanding we replace our ESXi deployments with... VirtualBox (no, really).
Honestly, what was the point of continuing to fund OpenSolaris? Tiny market share, no prospects for improvement. They're already funding a different open source operating system.
Caring about open source isn't about funding infinite options everywhere.
They kept developing and selling Solaris and OpenSolaris kept the team happy. I doubt it was going to be that expensive on their part, especially if they could use Solaris sales to fund it.
Also part of OpenSolaris was OpenZFS, used in many NAS systems worldwide. When they killed OpenSolaris the ZFS people also left Oracle.
> Oracle does care about open source, to the extent that they have been the top Linux kernel contributor several times.
Back when I worked for Huawei, we regularly figured in the list of top contributors to the Linux kernel each cycle. I never got the impression that Huawei cares about open source. It was just a pragmatic, disinterested business decision.
Based on your provided links the apples to apples comparison for RHEL Server Standard Support ($799) would be the Oracle Basic Support ($499)
Also, considering that OEL is downstream from RHEL how sustainable do we really think it would be for RHEL to downstream from OEL? How long would OEL invest and maintain in OS components that don’t directly benefit their specific offerings? Is there evidence to suggest there is any truth behind that offer? In my years of following the Linux ecosystem Oracle’s niche seems to have largely evolved around performance optimizations that solve specific problems they experience with other products or feature enhancements to facilitate new developments within their product ecosystem (which is still great for the community!) but what I have not seen is general purpose stewardship of the ecosystem of packages outside the kernel. I have no doubts they have made contributions of that nature but that has certainly not been a constant in what I have personally observed thus far. Perhaps I’m looking in the wrong places but I genuinely don’t believe Oracle would truly take on that responsibility nor do I believe that they would be anywhere near as effective as Red Hat at executing it
Oracle does maintain Solaris, which would seem to me to entail a much larger support burden than Red Hat's stewardship of their enterprise Linux distribution.
Oracle also ships a few Linux userspace utilities outside of the main yum repos; the btrfs utilities come to mind. There really isn't any obvious btrfs performance need within Oracle or its products, which runs contrary to the spirit of your observations; in fact the Oracle database is explicitly not supported on btrfs.
Note 2290489.1: "Oracle DB has specifically said that they do not support using BTRFS filesystems... BTRFS is optimized for non-database workloads."
I will also somewhat agree with you in circumspection on the quality of Oracle's 24x7 support. I have endured frustrating delays on SRs for various reasons, and have been forced to escalate in the past. I don't know if IBM's $1,299 24x7 support is good, but I can say that Oracle's has been astonishingly bad - be prepared to escalate, which usually moves things along.
I think that, if IBM decided to let go of all of their RHEL developers, Oracle is certainly capable of assuming this burden.
> Oracle does maintain Solaris, which would seem to me to entail a much larger support burden than Red Hat's stewardship of their enterprise Linux distribution.
This seems like a non-sequitur in a conversation about open-source OSes.
I do not understand how, as Solaris was open previous to Oracle's acquisition.
Red Hat does not maintain all of the code in RHEL - they repackage and patch everything taken from other developers. Very few packages are authored solely by them.
I don't know what relationship Oracle has with the current owner of the UNIX System V source (appears to be The Open Group), but Oracle is responsible for vastly more of the kernel and userspace in Solaris than RHEL.
> Red Hat does not maintain all of the code in RHEL - they repackage and patch everything taken from other developers.
This is false. Red Hat does maintain code that is shipped by default with RHEL. It should be noted though, the number of packages that are part of default RHEL installation is small. Also upstream first policy basically means, any proposed patch must first be merged in upstream before being backported to rhel. If that does not make them maintainers, I don't know what will. Being sole author and maintainer are not the same thing.
> Oracle does maintain Solaris, which would seem to me to entail a much larger support burden than Red Hat's stewardship of their enterprise Linux distribution.
Solaris was effectively killed off in 2017 when Oracle laid off most people working on it. And Open Solaris is dead too.
Rumours of our death are, as ever, greatly exaggerated. We continue to maintain the core OS facilities provided by illumos and the organisations behind distributions like SmartOS and OmniOS continue to ship maintained, supported software to a mixture of community and commercial users.
>"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."
Anybody who watched what Oracle did to OpenSolaris after the Sun acquisition who does this might as well start planning for their alternate product launch right now because they're gonna need it when Oracle changes direction.
> Oracle does care about open source, to the extent that they have been the top Linux kernel contributor several times.
Linux kernel is not entirety of Linux. Given that there is Oracle cloud and various hardware Oracle has to support, it will be almost unthinkable if Oracle did not contribute to Linux kernel.
But - I will be interested in Oracle's support for broader Linux ecosystem. How about contributions to GCC, Gnome (or any other DE as a matter of fact), Wayland/xorg etc? Oracle strictly contributes to projects from which it can benefit immediately.
Technically, yes, it is. "Linux" refers to the kernel, not to all of the other stuff you need on top of the kernel for a fully-formed OS. Although "Linux" is not used in that sense in the world at large anymore.
But this distinction is why you see some people mentioning that you should say "Gnu/Linux" and the like when referring to the OS as whole.
I will say that Oracle does contribute to gcc, gdb, and other parts of the GNU tool chain. I interviewed a few years ago with the team that does it. I don’t know how large the contributions are, but they seem super passionate about what they do and believe strongly in giving back
They might have an occasional commit or two but clearly they can't stand behind their own promise of developing/supporting an EL distro the way Red hat does. I also don't see it changing tbh. I don't see troves of Open source engineers at Red Hat(or other companies) making a bee line for joining Oracle.
It takes people a long time to readjust preconceptions. Microsoft was the big bad for most of my life, but it took ~8 years after Ballmerś retirement for people to start noticing Microsoftś prestigious opensourcing, interesting cloud offerings etc. where itś now a commonplace that they've improved. Fascinating really.
Oracleś got quite the history, but they have been supporting Linux and Java well and killing Solaris was a segue into Linux too, ergo more open.
To answer your question specifically, I'm used to "English (intl, with AltGr dead keys)" but in Linux Mint there are like 20 options. I was trying "US, intl, AltGr Unicode combining" or perhaps "US, intl, with dead keys" or such. (I've tried about a dozen in the last 2 days.) Instead of an apostrophe, they were generating what could become an accent mark, a stress mark or diacritic depending on the next letter. On "with AltGr dead keys" you must use right alt+apostrophe for that effect. (The quotation marks would do the same thing.)
Anyway, the keyboard lets me type things like þðßáœßðfhëü´6´^¨¼²³¤` with 2 buttons like shift to make a capital! This is good for German, Spanish and French, but Hungarian and Romanian require 3 buttons, then a 4th which is more tedious.
left alt shift 5 = ş ţ romanian
left alt shift 3 = ā lines for latin
left alt shift 2 = ű ő - hungarian long umlaut
On some keyboard layouts, pressing the quote mark starts a modifyer and then depending on the layout the following character is combined with the quote mark. Most English layouts don't include ś in this, but some Eastern European (?) languages use that character more often and so include them in this modifyer shortcut.
Oracle has got the history and continues the same history, including the lawyers.
You know why? The entire business is a cult structured around their majority owner, Larry who has never stepped away from the business.
Back when Oracle came out with that blog article I tried to recreate the results showing that they were indeed the top contributor. I have no idea what metric they use, but it must be something very specific.
And to be fair, Oracle has been a remarkably good steward of Java. It's truly amazing how fast and far Java has come since the Java 7 and Java 8 days. It's been on a rocket sled of development, while still being shockingly well behaved for earlier code. If there's any critique, it's "too fast". But that's nonsense, since the LTS work helps maintain stability.
And it's pretty wide open. They keep some things close to their vest, which is their prerogative, but even some of that stuff has been opening up over time as well.
It's not been a seamless transition, but it's not been awful either. Developers are managing.
How Oracle handles Java (business-wise, not in technological terms) is one of the things that tells me that Oracle is still the toxic company it's always been.
They also buried a call home into the VBox Guest Extensions and eventually started sending legal demands to companies as well. Because while VBox was open license, the VBox Guest Extensions have a non-commercial use license by default but that doesn't stop VBox from asking you to install them innocently on the first run.
Also 3 years ago, the guy in charge of a Oracle database we had (now migrated to MSSQL) accidentally downloaded the wrong Oracle database software from their portal. It turns out Oracle just lets you download any variant in their portal and then just send you legal demands for payment when you accidentally use a higher tier than you licensed. Something they can absolutely fix themselves to prevent. Of course we told them to fuck off since we didn't use any feature specific to the other tier and deployed the correct variant.
Assuming that you are using the Standard Edition/2 of the database, this is licensed at $17,500/core. On x86, there is a 2-for-1 core discount.
If you download Enterprise Edition and use it to perform an upgrade from your SE2 database, then you will then be on the hook for the full $47,500/core.
There are two ways to undo this license change. a) Run "catdwgrd.sql" to get back to the SE2 release, then upgrade again with the correct license, or b) unload all of the data in the database (via exp/imp or data pump), then load it into a new database that is created with the correct license.
Staying on an EE database will certainly place you on the new pricing tier.
> They also buried a call home into the VBox Guest Extensions
This is incorrect and actively misleading, because you are conflating 2 different things.
The Virtualbox Guest Additions are 100% FOSS and are included in many distros, including Ubuntu -- `apt install -y virtualbox-guest-x11` -- as well as being an optional extra with VirtualBox itself as an ISO file.
The point of using setAccessible with reflection was to access private fields and methods, and the module features in Java 9 made that impossible without passing a gigantic list of command-line flags to every invocation of Java.
I agree with your blind hatred of Oracle. But you have to admit, this is pretty epic inter-company trolling, and what Oracle says in its post is basically right.
Yeah Red Hat does share all the code for customers who purchase binaries and they are not imposing further restrictions on recipients of those binaries with their EULA. If the EULA is violated Red Hat is simply exercising their rights to not distribute future binaries and source thus not violating the GPL clause you mention
And yet they promised to use blackmailing tactics to severe relationship with those customers who want to exercise their rights to the code and republish it.
Based on what I can tell Red Hat agrees with that and has gone through great efforts to invest in and evolve the CentOS project. The current state of the project is CentOS stream which is still a LTS enterprise distribution and has an efficient dev cycle that prevents the delays seen in years past. Doesn’t centos stream fill the niche you are describing?
It comes close, but doesn't fill the niche because according to Red Hat, CentOS Stream should not be used in production. People do and for the most part they have no issues, but as long as the maintainers themselves are telling people not to run it in production, I would never recommend somebody to use it for serious workloads. And if you can't use it for serious workloads, then you should invest your time into a different ecosystem that can be used for serious workloads.
What do they do there so it’s suddenly not suitable? Introduce bugs on purpose? Break dependencies just so? Put in insecure defaults? If you are not an organization that requires an actual compliance department to be able to work for governments and the military, how is it different?
People have been doing this, or running Ubuntu LTS without Pro or other forms of paid support from Canonical.
If you’re running something in production you’re almost certainly making money off of it, so maybe you should send some of that money to RedHat for licenses?
> If you’re running something in production you’re almost certainly making money off of it
That is an extremely incorrect premise. There are tons of things in production that people don't make money on. Tons of new products don't make money for many years. And even if it is profitable, profit margins are often thin and RHEL is not cheap.
I have about 10 services in public-facing production right now (on Alma), and only one is profitable, and that runs in a container anyway (the host is not RHEL, just my container). I also have about a dozen or so personal/private services that I use for myself and my family. Those don't make any money either, I spend about $80 per month to run them. If I had to pay for a RHEL license for each of those, I'd just have to shut them down.
Which seems more reasonable to you: move my life to a different base that does support my niche, or shut everything down?
Are you sure that is really a supported RHEL configuration?
As far as I know, to get support unless you have a pretty special (and more expansive and expensive) support contract you're supposed to run a RHEL host and a RHEL base layer for the container images.
Your configuration looks like running standard RHEL over something not-RHEL, but without anything besides binary compatibility; so why not run RHEL UBI?
RHEL UBI has a much more lax license that you can almost pretty much use and basically redistribute freely, and you can get support for the RHEL components on it.
Isn’t this kind of what the RHEL clones were doing? Taking a snapshot of RHEL and then repackaging it, and in the case of Rocky Linux selling support. All without actually making any contributions back to the community. Almalinux actually contributes patches so I feel they will end up coming to an agreement with Red Hat but the likes of Rocky Linux seemed to be largely exploitive. Red Hat seems to be saying “hey you can have the code but we aren’t going to make the distribution for you. Here is a link to Stream feel free to make your own distribution”
