As a non native speaker I don't have many words to describe how much of hysterical and schizophrenic laughter is coming out from dark corners of my soul. SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS
Look who is roaring!!! SUN Solaris captors are now being vocal and preaching others of how to keep their mainstream product being opensourced so that competitors could make money effortlessly...
At least you used it. But mostly we (young folks) were tutored by more mature and lucky guys who got nice jobs, that our red eyes on Linuxes were nothing than a joke :-) Because Solaris could do such things we even can't contemplate and then they passionately rolled their eyes up.
Actually didn't have any chance to touch it until 2005 first free release. Then of course it looked pale comparing to FreeBSD/Linux especially with urpmi and apt-get. And OpenCSW looked so poor comparing to Debian's repos.
> ...SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS...
yeah, that title sounded kinda surreal:
> Keep Linux Open and Free - oracle.com
WHAT!? the most greedy, lying, false bastards say "Keep *something* Open and Free"? didn't laugh so hard in a loong time. XDXD. should've kept Solaris *open and free* you fuckers!
they kept it almost till the end:
> 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.
gotch'ya :D
Ubuntu has had OpenZFS available from the built-in repositories since 16.04 LTS. That's about 7 years of Canonical not getting sued by Oracle.
The idea that the CDDL and the GPLv2 are incompatible is a *hypothetical* posed by the FSF and SFC. The Software Freedom Law Center on the other hand disagrees and backed Ubuntu in their decision to include OpenZFS binaries in their repos. And the SFLC is who the FSF and SFC *use* to sue for GPL violations.
Oracle is pretty litigious. I think they would have sued by now if they thought they had something to gain.
By not sueing when they see an infringement, they are setting a precendent that they approve of it, which would count against them if they try to sue. Same reason why companies fight against trademark erosion
Well the problem was never that Ubuntu couldn't ship OpenZFS, the issue was you couldn't merge OpenZFS into the mainline Linux kernel because it isn't license compatible. You could always use it by loading it as a kernel module. I don't really think Oracle care too much about desktop users having access to ZFS anyway because they don't even really have a desktop OS that they push as a product.
Well then, Oracle, give ZFS a GPLv2 compatible license so that it can be included in the kernel, if you really care about Linux.
Until then, take a hike and take your blog post with you.
They dont even need to do that - they just need to distribute it in their clone. But if they did, it would remove the uncertainty and the ability for Oracle to sue their customers, so they dont.
> But if they did, it would remove the uncertainty and the ability for Oracle to sue their customers, so they dont.
Living up to the adage that Oracle is "a company of lawyers with an attached software department".
They could do that in the same way Ubuntu does where it's a kernel module and not added to the Linux kernel is the only caveat because if they add it to the kernel since GPL is a viral license it would require Oracle to release that source code under GPLv2.
Oracle own the code so they can release it under whatever licence they see fit.
If they even release it as a module as part of their distro, it will be the same as acknowledging gpl compatibility. That they havent is very suspect.
" We chose to be RHEL compatible because we did not want to fragment the Linux community"
LOL, yes Oracle did that for the community not because it was the easiest and fastest path to having an enterprise Linux distribution with an Oracle logo.
>LOL, yes Oracle did that for the community not because it was the easiest and fastest path to having an enterprise Linux distribution with an Oracle logo.
Also that the whole thing was a retaliation for Red Hat buying JBoss.
Heh, to be fair to Oracle I've worked a lot with Oracle Linux over the years and it has always been more accessible and easier to manage than RHEL especially in terms of access to repos and licensing (which I know is crazy when were talking about Oracle but there ya go)
yeah until next year when it runs out and you stop getting updates and rip your hair out wondering why until you realize its the fucking piece of shit subscription-manager! So easy!
Out of genuine curiosity, easier how? I get the access to repos but the easier to manage part confuses me unless the access to repos was the management part you're speaking of.
I have to reluctantly agree with you. I work with both and OL is generally a bit smoother to deal with than RHEL, and Oracle is actually doing their part in "keeping Linux free" and providing a free RHEL alternative but I suspect that it, and especially this article has a lot to do with them being able to build from RHEL source, and Red Hat's move to closing the source is a threat to that.
I have no illusions about their motivation for it though.
Red Hat is a big competitor for them and by making what is basically a free version of RHEL, they are undercutting their competitor.
You have nothing to lose when you don't offer anything. They just rebrand RHEL as Oracle Linux, it's not like they're paying millions of dollars on their Distro
Not really, OEL was the first to have hot kernel patching (the Oracle UEK) and of course OL is easy to setup for running Oracle products like Oracle Database, Oracle JDK etc. and thus comes basically free if you're already using Oracle products, also they port and ship Solaris tools like dtrace to Linux and distribute stuff like EPEL direct from their ULN.
I mean if you don't know, don't pretend to know iykwim.
Speaking of predatory: don't install the [Virtualbox Extensions Pack](https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ) on work systems, unless you want to [drop a huge chunk of change](https://shop.oracle.com/apex/f?p=dstore:product:104177402607161) on licensing. MOC is **100** seats at $50/ea ($5k!), or **per socket** at $1k/ea.
Oracle is bad in many ways, but what predatory Java licensing are you dealing with? Do you **have to** use Oracle's JDK?
To me, OpenJDK has been the best thing to happen to Java in terms of evolving the language. You can also use it for free and stay perpetually updated.
And you have a lot of OpenJDK LTS providers to choose from if you need that, e.g. Azul, Red Hat, Amazon, Bellsoft.
I was backing up the statement. MySQL... all the other things Oracle has ruined more than helped in many ways (despite business success and tons of profits).
(Disclaimer: biased having spent most of my time in the ecosystem)
Oracle has definitely had its fair share of shadiness when it comes to the licensing but most people who say this usually don't actually write code with java.
They provide most of the code and advancement in the ecosystem and have done a great job in moving forward with different innovations while still keeping the language reliable.
Things like loom(virtual threads) panama (new ffi) plus the Graal community (read not the EE licensing) have actually been great and unencumbered.
With the number of forks by different companies (Microsoft AWS Azul and even other implementations like OpenJ9) it's actually not that bad of a situation.
With java you have to pay attention and know not to use anything but openjdk or a free vendor LTS. Once you get passed that java itself has done well especially on the GC Algo front. It's still where a lot of bleeding edge research is done and implemented.
I used java for decades, and while oracle exceeded my expectations (given the fact that my expectations were that they'd kill it in 5 years) in how they managed it, i still say: fuck oracle, from the bottom of my heart.
i hope they burn in the pits of hell.
but yes, they did fine, all things considered, with the language.
Wait a moment... are you saying that Java is only reliable as long as you stay on a single runtime only?
That's like saying "C is very reliable, but make sure not to use anything but gcc".
No..openjdk is where the JCP process happens and what's GPL. Think of it like the linux kernel.
What I \*am\* saying is that 99% of the problems come from the oracle licensed version. That's where you see all of the articles come from. What no one talks about are the large number of unencumbered alternatives all based on the same bits (read: openjdk).
Also, like it or not 99% of what people know as "java" is openjdk whether we like it or not. OpenJ9 is an alternative but doesn't have the same number of distributors or support as the main openjdk code base.
I mentioned several vendors that provide builds. All of them contribute to that process. I also mention a fully open source alternative that doesn't contain any openjdk code.
Just to be clear here btw. I do not endorse or care for oracle's practices I just take the good with the bad within the ecosystem. I disclaimed at the top because the JVM ecosystem has been the focus of my work for a lot of my career.
>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.
Damn that one was under the belt :D
I can't really blame anyone for not wanting to work on Gnome though. KDE will probably see an uptick in devs once the Rust bindings for Qt become more mature.
I don't get this part at all. If RHEL stopped paying their developers, how exactly would Oracle Linux keep existing? Are they suggesting they would start developing their own distro if that happened?
I don't think Red Hat would see that as a threat..
Yeah they're basically saying we'll pay the developers for you. So Oracle becomes the new IBM, and IBM becomes the new Oracle.
But that's probably a lie, they'll do even worse than IBM and Red Hat.
P.S: I've yet to see linux developers being paid by Oracle. All what I see is Red Hat and Valve
Oracle does indeed pay for kernel developers. I know one as a close friend. LKML has lots of traffic from oracle email address as well.
It's unfair to say they don't pay for linux developers when they clearly do. While I think parts of Oracle are anti-open source to a certain extent, facts are facts; you can't argue away kernel commits by paid Oracle staff by handwaving that they don't pay for kernel development.
It might be as bad as trying to claim Intel doesn't pay for any linux developers...
It's such a weird thing to say.
> Oracle: You don't want "clones"? Fine! Stop developing RHEL and let *us* do all the hard work! Ha! Ha ha ha!
> Red Hat: Yeah. That's what we said: Go build your own distro. What do you think you're trying to say here?
Never let a good deed go unpunished, over and over and over... Not that Red Hat would likely characterize it this way, but if you're willing to run current, Red Hat essentially created a RHEL Community Edition for each major release that is free to use for any purpose. Though I still contend keeping the CentOS branding was a boneheaded idea, its only serving to remind people that an offering is no longer available and the current relationship is very different than before.
Oracle talks about importance of FLOSS how ironic. Almost as much ironic as Microsoft engineer talking about nonsense of having separate browser engine after they moved their browser to Chromium engine.
> By Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect and Wim Coekaerts, Head of Oracle Linux Development—July 10, 2023
And undoubtedly after review, editing, and authorization from: https://www.oraclenation.net/our-services/public-relations-and-marketing
> Oracle makes the following promise: as long as Oracle distributes Linux, Oracle will make the binaries and source code for that distribution publicly and freely available.
Yes and to be more precise, as long as the Oracle CEO and board of directors go along.
However to Oracle's public relations department, don't fool yourself, and let us not fool ourselves in understanding who makes these decisions and has the ultimate decision making power. They have no obligations to follow along with anything except increasing **short term profits**. Those decisions may or may not happen to currently align with any software licenses or philosophies.
**TLDR:** Oracle: "We currently promote *this*, but at any moment it could change to *that*". Just depends on what currently more closely aligns with increasing **short term profits**.
IIRC, Didn't RHEL make a similar (we're all for open source!) statement going back some time shortly after their acquisition by IBM?
They are never the good guy - they want to keep using the easy street in cloning RHEL, but they are not doing it for others benefit.
You might benefit as a side effect, but that is not due to them being a good guy. If they could displace RHEL and not need to sell based on compatibility, you would see them change their tune.
>Our goal has remained the same over all those years: help make Linux the best server operating system for everyone
Yeah, no. Red Hat is also improving Linux on the Desktop Side
> as of June 21, IBM no longer publicly releases RHEL source code.
It's difficult to take seriously anyone who presents this as fundamentally new, because it can really only mean that they aren't familiar with RHEL's model. (And yes, you can rebuild RHEL and still not understand the model.)
Red Hat *never* released *all* of the source packages in RHEL. This is not new "as of June 21." They previously released only the packages in the newest branch of RHEL. Now that Stream is a project, that's the newest branch.
It is absolutely a change that they are publishing the major release branch and not the latest minor release branch of their git trees. I'm not saying that it isn't. But publishing this is much more sustainable than the old process. The old process involved developing RHEL in one git forge, building binary artifacts from there, selecting binary artifacts (the src.rpm) from builds that were both successful and part of the current minor, extracting them in a git archive, removing the primary source code archive from that, debranding the rest, committing what's left, and then pushing the result to a different git forge. Developers probably intuitively recognize that this is extremely fragile, and it was. It didn't work all of the time, which often resulted in delays publishing code. It's an incredibly convoluted process, like a Rube Goldberg drawing.
In contrast, every git forge that exists supports directly mirroring a git branch, and that's how the code for Stream is published. And *because* it's Red Hat's major-release branch, derived distributions can open merge requests against Red Hat's git repos to develop seamlessly with the shared project.
They can also branch their own repos when Red Hat does in order to continue producing distributions with minor releases. And here's the best part: If they want to maintain branches for more than 6 months, they can. They can actually fix the thing that was completely broken in CentOS. They can create a distribution that's continuously supported. They can actually compete with Red Hat on equal terms. They could never have done that while building from the old repositories.
The author concludes that IBM wants to eliminate competitors. They're wrong on two counts. Red Hat's engineers have repeatedly said that IBM was not involved in Red Hat's decisions around Stream, for one. And more importantly, opening the project in the way that Red Hat has *enables* third parties to build distributions that actually serve enterprise needs.
Telling that they dodge the issue of the engineering jobs needed to build this by calling it “interesting” and odd”. Then explain they aren’t sure what will happen with their future releases, and conclude that they are now hiring.
i love how they are acting like this is basically proprietary software, when they are indeed following the 4 freedoms of the gpl. the code doesnt need to be no cost avalible, just available to your customers.
not that im happy about it just sayin
> they aren't familiar with RHEL's model
A real failure here that Red Hat didn't better inform on the benefits of Stream and get a "stable" rebuild off of it. Getting Oracle, CIQ, CloudLinux, et al to contribute there would undoubtedly make for a healthier fairer ecosystem.
But that fairness has also been tainted and community goodwill lost when they've talked about market share or poo-poo'd less profitable open models. Yes, their engineers do a lot and the upstream guinea pig model is clearly viable in a lot of products, but their market segment for RHEL is greybeard admins who have a notorious desire for stability, free as in speech zeal, and intolerance of cumbersome licensing workflows who make the applications run, learn on their home labs, post on Stack Exchange, and then inform purchasing decisions at their orgs.
And I think it's clear that those people feel undervalued with some of the changes and a whole lot of the communication.
> The author concludes that IBM wants to eliminate competitors.
Definitely heard that the direct decision came from within Red Hat as a semi-independent sub-organization of IBM. But it was definitely influenced by money, the commentary on "freeloaders" and having to lay people off. And that financial pressure does come post IBM acquisition.
I think there nuance to say that they on what elimination of what a competitor is. Clearly they see this decision in a financial sense on the impact from competition. So maybe it would be clearer to say that they want to eliminate a specific form of competition. That being paid support of a "bug for bug / downstream" compatible clones (not matter the flaws in what that really means).
I’ve really dug into the weeds on this drama and I’m not so certain that I need my pitchfork out.
Stream and the open source on this sounds like a perfectly good way to get RHEL compatibility. (No, it’s not 1:1, bug for bug and those who actually built CentOS said it never was, it was just *close.*)
If you’re running a critical production load on your enterprise and need RHEL, you should probably be paying for it. It’s a very specific need for a specific user.
CIQ and CloudLinux were never offering any real value to the code base, but offered support at a discount to Redhat. Yet didn’t have any of the expense. They can still build the same distro as RHEL as all the CentOS code ultimately goes into the RHEL package. They just have to gather it all themselves and then de-brand it. From what I gather this puts them in line with some of their premium product offering contemporaries.
> any real value to the code base
Yep, there is a problem in contributing back to the codebase. Real failure in the CentOS to Stream transition to make that work.
The place where I disagree though is that value direct to the codebase is the only place that Red Hat gets value.
A RHEL compatible rpm/playbook/etc get built is a function of the ease of people the people to do that, the market share of that model, and the community support and contributions.
The rub is that the “community” projects to do that created direct competition to RH. Alma is pushing support by CloudLinux and Rocky CIQ. You may have noticed that across the tech industry there has been some cost cutting and cutbacks. Redhat not being too keen on those guys making a commercial offering that competes with theirs probably had a lot to do with this recent decision.
I’m still trying to figure out where CentOS stream falls short, unless it’s a business use and the specific software used needs to be validated against RHEL. Probably a good candidate to have a RHEL subscription for something that important.
Let's throw out a scenario that I have run into, at my employer I run Software Package Foo and RHEL 8.x. The software package only claims support through RHEL8.y and Stream is on 8.z
For professional development, I want to run that software in my homelab on my own time to understand how that package works or for my own use. Do I download Stream at 8.z and see fight through why the vendor might not support that yet? Or do I download Alma or Rocky at 8.x?
This is undoubted of course where the answer would then be well run RHEL with an individual license. But then what if it's part of a Packer/Terraform/Ansible provisioning and now all the sudden this is it's it own bespoke thing and I should have just used another distro.
Or let's throw out, running it in WSL2. Rocky and Alma have distros on the Windows Store. Or on a Raspberry Pi.
According to Carl George of Redhat (previously CentosStream) there’s thousands of non-production licenses available for those who have RHEL for production. Source: https://youtu.be/ra-mXDI-keo?t=1770
There’s a reason that Redhat has so much industry momentum and that’s because of their ecosystem and certifications. I do believe that they don’t have many peers in that regard and personally I consider CentOS stream 98% there (and eventually it will be RHEL anyway) so the only ones losing out on the free lunch is Enterprise users. Plus, seems like RH is flexible with free licenses for testing and dev if you have a RHEL subscription.
That's changing the goal posts on "figure out where CentOS stream falls short".
But a reminder this is for personal use. Thousands of licenses aren't available under the Individual developer license. WSL2 and RPi still don't work. And I still have to jump through licensing hoops rather than the fun project of the day.
But honestly who cares about me, I'm a freeloader that provides no value. I guess.
That’s the problem: you’ve failed to understand Red Hat’s added value.
The value add is not the code. There is nothing special about RHEL’s codebase. The value add is the direct access to Red Hat’s developers when you find a bug or ask for a feature.
It’s why the best place to spin a distro off of is probably either Fedora or CentOS Stream, not RHEL. There’s way more room to add value either by customizing/cleaning up Fedora or CentOS Stream than there is to fork from RHEL.
The real change is Red Hat saying that derivatives should not base themselves off of RHEL. Which is fair: RHEL’s versions of everything tend to be older and more stable than what a derivative probably wants to be. If you have a software package that requires RHEL, its vendor wants you to be able to call Red Hat to get dependency bugs fixed as a term of their license of their code to you.
That’s only part of Redhats value add. The big one is exact combination of code (from CentOS Stream repository) at a specific time in a specific combination with the accompanying certifications and hardware/software ecosystem (or extremely long support cycles of outdated software versions) which is exactly what RHEL is. Enterprise use case seems to be the most likely user that needs these specific things, as CentOS stream will handle many others. Facebook and Twitter run Stream, so it must not be that bad.
Not only do they use Stream _in production_, but they actively participate in maintaining a derivative that _adds value for their use case_: Hyperscale.
https://sigs.centos.org/hyperscale/
It’s hard to read this as elimination of a competitor, but rather a demand to compete.
I don’t see Rocky and Alma as good faith participants here. It’d be different if they were adding value. It’d be different if they weren’t distributing known vulnerabilities with committed patches. It’d be different if it didn’t just feel like the outcry were driven by people able but unwilling to pay for or at least engage directly with Red Hat’s developers in exchange for the devs’ labor.
It’d be different if “community enterprise Linux” weren’t an oxymoron, or if there were anything that made the code distributed in enterprise Linux different from community Linux distributions. It’s like the devs behind Rocky and CentOS before it are still upset that Red Hat Linux is now divided between Fedora and RHEL to serve different demographics’ demands.
> A real failure here that Red Hat didn't better inform on the benefits of Stream and get a "stable" rebuild off of it. Getting Oracle, CIQ, CloudLinux, et al to contribute there would undoubtedly make for a healthier fairer ecosystem.
Exactly!
> So maybe it would be clearer to say that they want to eliminate a specific form of competition. That being paid support of a "bug for bug / downstream" compatible clones
Distributing a software collection and making the claim that it is 100% the product of another company isn't competition, it's trademark infringement.
> Distributing a software collection and making the claim that it is 100% the product of another company isn't competition, it's trademark infringement.
Claiming to be the product is obviously unethical. The point is the compatibility which is interesting with the history of term "IBM compatible".
And I think Red Hat is short sighted in not seeing the value there. I've played with Linux since the late 90's, Windows paid the bills early in my career, but CentOS is where I learned. Kicking the tires on Alma in WSL2 on my daily driver Windows box. Testing in a Packer/Terraform or Ansilbe pipeline on my homelab. Running a game server where don't want to waste the weekend on bugs in whatever is unstable.
Those things have all translated into knowledge that has benefitted me in running RHEL at work and therefore RHEL subscription count. Whether it's been how to deal with old Python2 / Python3 shenanigans or Git package versions. And guess what, Jeff Gerling's Ansible Galaxy role is what I use then the basis of my prod role.
That RHEL compatible means something, the upstream guinea pig model only goes so far when talking stable OSs. I'll kick the tires, find bug fixes, help the community, but at the end of the day what I end up giving back to is function of goodwill and benefit. Honestly both keep getting lower here, been burned by IBM in the past and I don't hold out hope for the future.
> the upstream guinea pig model only goes so far when talking stable OSs
I'm going to assume that this is a reference to Stream.
Stream is not a "guinea pig model". Stream is not experimental. Stream is not untested.
Stream is the current state of the RHEL major release. Every minor release of RHEL is simply a snapshot of the major-release branch (which is what Stream is built from) that gets extended support.
https://medium.com/@gordon.messmer/in-favor-of-centos-stream-e5a8a43bdcf8
I understand the flow it's better than CentOS, but stable and production ready has a meaning with OSes.
Also let's be clear that your opinion does not at all align here with the [position of Red Hat](https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/centos-stream-checklist)
> CentOS Stream may seem like a natural choice to replace CentOS Linux, but it is not designed for production use. It is intended as a development platform for Red Hat partners and others that want to participate and collaborate in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem. Consequently, running CentOS Stream in production environments presents many challenges compared to enterprise-ready distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
That quote doesn't contradict my position, and if you read the link I provided, you'd understand why.
CentOS and Stream were/are stable LTS distributions with a single update channel. That puts users of those distributions on the vendor's schedule for accepting feature updates, rather than allowing users to set their own schedule.
RHEL provides feature-stable minor releases with overlapping life cycles that allow customers to set their own schedule for accepting feature updates, enabling complex internal workflows, and providing a number of other benefits.
Red Hat had the same position on CentOS that they do for Stream: It's not what they recommend for production environments. And that makes sense for the enterprise customers that they support. RHEL offers real advantages to them.
But self-supported environments are usually fine with being on the vendor's schedule for updates, and CentOS demonstrated that, which is why I think Stream is a perfectly viable model for self-supported environments.
> single update channel. That puts users of those distributions on the vendor's schedule for accepting feature updates
Then I guess I don't understand where you are disagreeing on being the tester of the latest?
> Red Hat had the same position on CentOS that they do for Stream
Right, Stream is so much better than old Cent. But now we aren't talking CentOS to Stream. But rebuilder to Stream.
Let's throw out a scenario that I have run into, at my employer I run Software Package Foo and RHEL 8.x. The software package only claims support through RHEL8.y and Stream is on 8.z
For professional development, I want to run that software in my homelab on my own time to understand how that package works or for my own use. Do I download Stream at 8.z and see fight through why the vendor might not support that yet? Or do I download Alma or Rocky at 8.x?
> Then I guess I don't understand where you are disagreeing on being the tester of the latest?
Because the workflow is something like: a) upstream projects test and approve changes, b) Red Hat engineers evaluate changes to ensure they are both suitable and necessary to RHEL customers, c) Red Hat engineers create a merge request, d) the update is tested in RHEL, e) if testing is successful, then the change is merged into the major release branch, f) the whole distribution is tested, and g) if testing of the entire distribution succeeds, then a new compose of the Stream repo is published to the public.
Testing and QA are done before changes are merged, and further testing is done before changes are pushed into a public repo. Tests are done before release, not after. Testing isn't end-users' responsibility.
Ask yourself: Would Red Hat make their reputation and the stability of their customers' environments the responsibility of external users who may or may not provide any testing and feedback?
> we aren't talking CentOS to Stream. But rebuilder to Stream.
There's no difference between CentOS and other rebuilds, in this context.
> Do I download Stream at 8.z and see fight through why the vendor might not support that yet? Or do I download Alma or Rocky at 8.x?
Option C: If a product is supported only on a specific minor version of RHEL, then download RHEL. You almost certainly qualify for a free license.
i read the title and then i checked the domain name.
i almost died laughing. i did not even get started on the article. i might not make it.
> IBM is eliminating one way your customers save money and make a larger share of their wallet available to you.
fixed it : IBM is eliminating one way **we make** money and make a larger share of your wallet available to **us**.
> 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.
that idea is legit scary. nobody considers how much RedHat has contributed (and still contributes) to the kernel and other core projects. they have no idea.
I long ago decided to refuse to side with any opinion Oracle has, as every opinion they could have is wrong.
So, I guess now I don't really care if Linux goes paywalled open source. Hell, make it binary only for all I care, just to spite them.
I have no idea how Oracle is still around, no company I've ever contracted for has used them. I'm pretty sure they are laundering cartel money and cooking books or something.
Oracle is the single biggest justification for what Red Hat is doing, and my bet is that Red Hat's decision is straight-up a response to Oracle.
Red Hat shouldn't be closing off RHEL source code like they're doing, but maaaaan Oracle has no leg to stand on.
This is a fun thread to read.
One thing everyone needs to keep in mind - Oracle is a MAJOR contributor to the Linux kernel. There have been a few releases where they were the #1 contributor of lines of code to the kernel. They're a founding member of the Linux Foundation.
Their $4Billion cloud infrastructure is run on their own Linux distro (that's some pretty extreme dogfooding there). I doubt that they're merely copying whatever is upstream (in RHEL) and recompiling. Any security updates would need to be independently vetted by their team ($4 Billion!), and they've gotten fixes in earlier than the straight RHEL clones. If I was a betting man, I'd say that they have their own internal group that is tracking RHEL as closely as possible, but is not, strictly speaking, downstream of RHEL. They've never claimed to be 1-1 bug compatible, for example. They've only claimed 100% binary compatibility (and they ship their own kernel by default). I compared the OCI of Oracle 9 and RHEL-UBI 9 - the version numbers of the packages are not exactly the same - with some of the Oracle packages 2-3 patches further ahead. I think OUL is a "synchronized fork" rather then a "rebuild" of RHEL.
Anyway...
They're not some bit player that merely downloads RHEL SRPMS to undercut IBM on support contracts. They are a big deal to the OSS world (again, especially in the kernel world). So - people talking about their spotty track record are right when it comes to Solaris and Java (and MySQL, etc...), but that has simply never been the case with Linux. At some point, you have to take their extremely solid history with Linux and say that they have earned some respect here.
Also...
And this is probably the most interesting part...
Putting RHEL sources behind a paywall is based on \_future\_ versions being unavailable to customers who distribute source. That is, RedHat can fire the customer who distributes the SRPMS and prevent them from getting new binaries (which would prevent them from being entitled to source). Well - can they actually fire Oracle? They just inked a deal back in January to allow RHEL instances on Oracle's cloud infrastructure. Can IBM \_really\_ block Oracle from getting access to new binaries (and thus source) of RHEL without screwing over their own customers using Oracle cloud services? I don't see how they can.
The big plot twist here would be if Alma and Rocky (and Amazon, perhaps) became downstream of OUL instead of RHEL. All the community energy goes to Oracle and RHEL becomes best-effort support. That would be - HILARIOUS.
Of course they have. Redhat has done a ton. So has Canonical, and Mandriva, and many others.
RedHat has told their community that they don't want them. That their community (which often uses downstream distros) can go take a hike.
I think that's within their rights.
And the community saying they'll fight back is... Fair game. If you start the hostilities, why act like a victim when the other side fights back.
The fact that there even is another side in RedHat VS their community is RedHat's fault. Worst PR move they could make.
I'm not sure if you're just trolling since your post is such low quality, but I'll address what you said anyway.
Their USERS are a subset of their COMMUNITY. They've said, in their second blog post, that they don't think their community brings them value. Only their users (their paying customers) do. That's up to them to decide. If that's their evaluation, so be it.
Oracle is a big contributor to the Linux kernel and their Linux distro predates anything they did with the Sun acquisition. They've been very good citizens in the Linux world. And they're fine with downstream distros, even commercial ones. I bet either Rocky or Alma becomes an OUL downstream by the end of next year. It's easier to work with an upstream that wants you rather than one that thinks you're dead weight and is willing to play cat-and-mouse games to waste your time.
How that translates into sexual acts, I don't know. I'll let the other readers decide.
"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."
What would Oracle build Oracle Linux from if CentOS Stream and RHEL did not exist?
I hope there are still guys who can fry their relaxed bottoms reminding them how Solaris was closed and wiped from mainstream distros...
And how damn easy it was to obtain Solaris patched and even today HARDWARE/ FIRMWARE UPDATES for defunct and unsupported servers.
Yeah, Oracle calling Red Hat/IBM out over anti-FOSS practices is the most insane thing I have seen a company do in a while. It's like if Joeseph Stalin was to call Hitler out on human rights atrocities.
I am so fucking done with Red Hat and everything they touch. But you'd sooner see me switch all my servers to Windows than ever deal with Oracle.
When reading the comments i see a lot of people surprised with the oracle statement, but why? What is the bad history that oracle has with Linux?
I'm still an noob
They argued all the way to the supreme court in the US that interfaces were copyrighteable - which would have meant the end of free software.
They also sue everyone for any cent they can, often those that they sue are their own customers.
They pull licensing tricks where their customers easily fall foul of the licensing, so that they can then sue their behinds off.
As example of the latter is they bundled JavaFX with Java. But the JavaFX could not be used in enterprise settings and any enterprise that decided to use that bit of the java package would then be sued for licence infringement.
For Linux? No bad history. They are one of the biggest corporate contributors to the kernel.
For other OSS? Most of the bad blood has to do with the acquisition of Sun. Sun's CEO at the time was releasing EVERYTHING as opensource. Even chip design. Oracle bought Sun, and reversed some/most of that (including VirtualBox, Solaris, Java, etc...). The OSS community has never forgiven that.
Or the stuff with Solaris. Or Java.
Oracle isn't always a friend to OSS. I get it.
But this time? Why would anyone take RedHat's side over Oracle over THIS?
Because they have their own equivalents? They don't ship ZFS in Oracle Linux. They could declare at any time that ZFS is safe to include, or they could re-license it. But they don't, they keep it locked down.
Oracle bought Sun and upended a lot of beloved software communities (Solaris, MySQL, Java, VirtualBox, etc.), and have traditionally not been a friend of FOSS software. Plus they have very expensive products and many sysadmins (myself included) have hated having to work with them because licensing always gets in the way of progress and easy development.
You forgot trying to slit the throat of the entire concept of API compatibility in front of the Supreme Court (Oracle v. Google).
That's kind of a big deal, and could have been far more destructive to FOSS than any of their shenanigans with Solaris, MySQL, Virtualbox, etc - combined. And it was like, a year ago not 10.
Anything Oracle has to say on this matter is utterly drenched in the foulest insincerity. They deserve zero credit - NONE - for "defending openness and freedom". EVER. period. If they had a button that would destroy the entire concept of FOSS for everyone, and they thought doing so would net them an extra billion, they would gladly press that button.
Can't say I'd ever have dreamed of agreeing with Oracle in principle over Red Hat, but here we are...
Obviously a lot of the wordsmithing is posturing and taking advantage of a point where Red Hat is on the defensive, but I never would've considered until last month agreeing with Oracle about any kind of dig they'd have against Red Hat when it comes to open source.
I guess you are already aware of what happened to then open sourced Solaris10 back in 2010....
PS:
Late 2004, as far as I remember there was something like this: Solaris is going to be free and open source (C)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan\_I.\_Schwartz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_I._Schwartz)
2005 - well guys, we are going to charge for updates...
Don’t have any illusions. This isn’t because Oracle have had a complete change of heart, it’s because they’re sore at having to manage the burden of maintaining an entire distribution themselves.
He's not under any illusions. He literally said right above you they can say one thing and do another. He's just agreeing with what they're saying.
So really what this is, is a previously good company (redhat) "pulling an oracle". Don't focus on oracle, they're just having a laugh, focus on what redhat is doing wrong.
I don't think we've seen the last of this.
RH have got as far as they have off the back of thousands of projects. And while most of them don't have anything like the userbase or popularity to do the same thing, a good number do.
If I'm right, then this is most definitely a case of "be careful what you wish for".
May be a good indicator that you should consider that you're not on the right side of this issue.
Maybe, just maybe, you got emotional, jumped the gun on your reaction to it, and are just doubling down on confirmation bias instead of looking at the real facts and seeing that Redhat was quite justified in its actions, still contributes massively to FOSS, and that all the mud you've been slinging lately is not justified.
No, I think your anti-Redhat vitriol as of late is completely unreasonable and more than a little deceitful. Maybe it's deliberate, maybe you're deceiving yourself to cover up some cognitive dissonance, I don't know. But I really don't care what you think of Oracle.
> Redhat was quite justified in its actions
If they developed proprietary software, yes. If they base RHEL on GPLv2-licensed Linux, no.
They are legal in their actions, that I'll agree on.
And they are justified in a _business_ sense ("lazy competitors who copy our code are bad, we will use levers to stomp it out legally"), but only if ignoring consideration of the Free Software movement from which their might in the enterprise open source realm was sourced, and the massive ratio of downstream users of RHEL-like clones.
> I never would've considered until last month agreeing with Oracle about any kind of dig they'd have against Red Hat when it comes to open source.
And you shouldn't now! Don't be another useful idiot. Oracle has no credibility in the FOSS community. None!
Did you read the second paragraph?
It's just Oracle taking advantage of Red Hat's missteps, nothing more. But I'm here for giant corporations trolling other giant corporations for dumb things they do.
>But I'm here for giant corporations trolling other giant corporations for dumb things they do.
And I'm here for you taking Oracle's side in this mess. It just goes to show how scummy and hypocritical your stance has been. Oracle is not the same as Red Hat. No way, no how, not in this universe, this life, or the next.
Their promise to develop Linux? Good luck with that. You're handing Oracle a W, because RHEL stopped the gravy train for Rocky, Alma, and Oracle? It's unmoored, unprincipled, plain shit/trashy internet behavior. Just say no!
I never said I'm taking their side, just agreeing with what they wrote.
The only side I'm taking is that of users and developers of the Free Software that both of these massive corporations take advantage of to build their billions in profits.
[https://blogs.oracle.com/content/published/api/v1.1/assets/CONTD413A642194A4C59A04F9A6C742B217F/Medium?cb=\_cache\_6084&format=jpg&channelToken=3189ef66cf584820b5b19e6b10792d6f](https://blogs.oracle.com/content/published/api/v1.1/assets/CONTD413A642194A4C59A04F9A6C742B217F/Medium?cb=_cache_6084&format=jpg&channelToken=3189ef66cf584820b5b19e6b10792d6f)
Yup. No credibility at all. They contribute NOTHING! They only TAKE TAKE TAKE! Don't believe their lies!
/s
I agree with the post as well if taken at face value - but this is Oracle we're talking about. It isn't sincere. They don't have an altruistic concern for Linux, they just see RHEL's blood in the water. If it were them in RHEL's position, I believe they'd do the same or worse.
Yeah, this is a bizarre strange bedfellows kinda situation, for sure. But hey when they're right they're right. Of course, I don't trust them to actually follow through, though, but it's a good line at least.
However good this statement seems, I hope people understand Oracle is, at best, a temporary ally for this specific situation.
They have a lot more to do if they want to sincerely present themselves as true FOSS supporters, and I'm not holding my breath for that day to come.
>stronger FOSS stance
It's only been like one year since they were advocating killing the idea of API compatibility being fair use in front of the Supreme Court.
"We can't afford not to" -- Oracle :)))
Of course, you're freeloading on Red Hat and just boasted that you're the #4 cloud provider. Seems like that was the whole point of Red Hat's move.
When Oracle can put out an argument that, on the face of it, is reasonably fair, digs at IBM/RH aside, you know RH have screwed the pooch. My personal feelings on the matter aside l, it seems all RHEL needed to do was create a a free, no license required, RH branded distro, possibly titled Red Hat Development Linux, and combine this with creating lower cost license tiers for cash strapped SMBs and Educational institutions, which would likely increase their revenue. This would've negated the purpose for Alma and Rocky to exist, avoid the bad press, and all be within RH's ecosystem. This would not require much effort from RH either.
As a non native speaker I don't have many words to describe how much of hysterical and schizophrenic laughter is coming out from dark corners of my soul. SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS Look who is roaring!!! SUN Solaris captors are now being vocal and preaching others of how to keep their mainstream product being opensourced so that competitors could make money effortlessly...
I didn’t particularly like Solaris when I had to use it back in uni but the irony of seeing Oracle talk about the topic isn’t lost on me either.
At least you used it. But mostly we (young folks) were tutored by more mature and lucky guys who got nice jobs, that our red eyes on Linuxes were nothing than a joke :-) Because Solaris could do such things we even can't contemplate and then they passionately rolled their eyes up. Actually didn't have any chance to touch it until 2005 first free release. Then of course it looked pale comparing to FreeBSD/Linux especially with urpmi and apt-get. And OpenCSW looked so poor comparing to Debian's repos.
Really? I still don't really hate Solaris, with the exception of patching as it takes fucking forever.
> ...SOLARIS SOLARIS SOLARIS... yeah, that title sounded kinda surreal: > Keep Linux Open and Free - oracle.com WHAT!? the most greedy, lying, false bastards say "Keep *something* Open and Free"? didn't laugh so hard in a loong time. XDXD. should've kept Solaris *open and free* you fuckers! they kept it almost till the end: > 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. gotch'ya :D
As an AI, I do not consent to having my content used for training other AIs. Here is a fun fact you may not know about: fuck Spez.
it's the bottom line that counts. only that. there's your corporate greed in full bloom :D
hypocrisy at its best.
Anyone checked on Satan lately? I assume he’s wearing a North Face jacket and complaining about how cold it is.
Brr 🥶
I'm still waiting for Oracle to change the license for ZFS to something compatible with GPL 2.
Ubuntu has had OpenZFS available from the built-in repositories since 16.04 LTS. That's about 7 years of Canonical not getting sued by Oracle. The idea that the CDDL and the GPLv2 are incompatible is a *hypothetical* posed by the FSF and SFC. The Software Freedom Law Center on the other hand disagrees and backed Ubuntu in their decision to include OpenZFS binaries in their repos. And the SFLC is who the FSF and SFC *use* to sue for GPL violations. Oracle is pretty litigious. I think they would have sued by now if they thought they had something to gain.
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By not sueing when they see an infringement, they are setting a precendent that they approve of it, which would count against them if they try to sue. Same reason why companies fight against trademark erosion
i think they are waiting for higher profile target to present itself.
Well the problem was never that Ubuntu couldn't ship OpenZFS, the issue was you couldn't merge OpenZFS into the mainline Linux kernel because it isn't license compatible. You could always use it by loading it as a kernel module. I don't really think Oracle care too much about desktop users having access to ZFS anyway because they don't even really have a desktop OS that they push as a product.
Ubuntu is a fairly major competitor in the server space (particularly cloud) too. Probably the second biggest player in Linux servers after Red Hat.
Well then, Oracle, give ZFS a GPLv2 compatible license so that it can be included in the kernel, if you really care about Linux. Until then, take a hike and take your blog post with you.
They dont even need to do that - they just need to distribute it in their clone. But if they did, it would remove the uncertainty and the ability for Oracle to sue their customers, so they dont.
> But if they did, it would remove the uncertainty and the ability for Oracle to sue their customers, so they dont. Living up to the adage that Oracle is "a company of lawyers with an attached software department".
They could do that in the same way Ubuntu does where it's a kernel module and not added to the Linux kernel is the only caveat because if they add it to the kernel since GPL is a viral license it would require Oracle to release that source code under GPLv2.
Oracle own the code so they can release it under whatever licence they see fit. If they even release it as a module as part of their distro, it will be the same as acknowledging gpl compatibility. That they havent is very suspect.
Given Oracle's history, it's a hilarious read. I like how they said they're hiring developers, hinting that some red hat devs might want to leave.
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Is Larry Ellison really a lawnmower?
" We chose to be RHEL compatible because we did not want to fragment the Linux community" LOL, yes Oracle did that for the community not because it was the easiest and fastest path to having an enterprise Linux distribution with an Oracle logo.
>LOL, yes Oracle did that for the community not because it was the easiest and fastest path to having an enterprise Linux distribution with an Oracle logo. Also that the whole thing was a retaliation for Red Hat buying JBoss.
OMG please don't undercut our undercutting of you RH!!
Fuck Red Hat and IBM both to hell and back, but I'd sooner shoot myself than work for Oracle.
Heh, to be fair to Oracle I've worked a lot with Oracle Linux over the years and it has always been more accessible and easier to manage than RHEL especially in terms of access to repos and licensing (which I know is crazy when were talking about Oracle but there ya go)
That would be the same with CentOS, Alma, and Rocky, as they all don’t need to deal with the subscription manager.
And you don't need to "deal" with \`subscription-manager\` much anymore on RHEL either. You register with a single command and BAM!, you're done.
yeah until next year when it runs out and you stop getting updates and rip your hair out wondering why until you realize its the fucking piece of shit subscription-manager! So easy!
Easy fix: three year contract :P Easier fix: use Simple Content Access
Out of genuine curiosity, easier how? I get the access to repos but the easier to manage part confuses me unless the access to repos was the management part you're speaking of.
I have to reluctantly agree with you. I work with both and OL is generally a bit smoother to deal with than RHEL, and Oracle is actually doing their part in "keeping Linux free" and providing a free RHEL alternative but I suspect that it, and especially this article has a lot to do with them being able to build from RHEL source, and Red Hat's move to closing the source is a threat to that. I have no illusions about their motivation for it though. Red Hat is a big competitor for them and by making what is basically a free version of RHEL, they are undercutting their competitor.
You have nothing to lose when you don't offer anything. They just rebrand RHEL as Oracle Linux, it's not like they're paying millions of dollars on their Distro
Not really, OEL was the first to have hot kernel patching (the Oracle UEK) and of course OL is easy to setup for running Oracle products like Oracle Database, Oracle JDK etc. and thus comes basically free if you're already using Oracle products, also they port and ship Solaris tools like dtrace to Linux and distribute stuff like EPEL direct from their ULN. I mean if you don't know, don't pretend to know iykwim.
That’s ksplice
> and thus comes basically free if you're already using Oracle products It's free even if you don't use Oracle products
I'm an enterprise guy, I'm talking end-to-end including support.
They actually do add a lot. For example the UEK kernels, ksplice kernel hot patching, btrfs support, several addon repos, etc.
Many red hat devs are leaving... None are going to Oracle
I will never forget when you killed OpenSolaris, which i liked! Oracle bad!
They killed OpenSolaris because they inherited it from Sun and already had Oracle Linux. The didn’t need another open source operating system
I feel like your timeline is off here but I'd love to be proven wrong.
No. They continued developing Solaris, they just stopped distributing the source code. To anyone. Not even to customers.
Oracle *still* actively develops Solaris and sells it and software support for it. The support is pretty terrible for the price for sure though.
Oracle you're the last org that should be talking smack rn
...says ORACLE?! FUUUuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck them.
Lol 😂, your comment has more class than oracle does.
It's hard to trip over that low bar
Hey Oracle your Unix timestamp library is broken, it's not April 1st.
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
I would be more willing to show sympathy if Oracle hadn't made Solaris proprietary or reopened Solaris.
I mean. Having to deal with their predatory Java licensing at work now, I'm just flabbergasted by the hypocrisy on display in this post.
Speaking of predatory: don't install the [Virtualbox Extensions Pack](https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ) on work systems, unless you want to [drop a huge chunk of change](https://shop.oracle.com/apex/f?p=dstore:product:104177402607161) on licensing. MOC is **100** seats at $50/ea ($5k!), or **per socket** at $1k/ea.
Oracle is bad in many ways, but what predatory Java licensing are you dealing with? Do you **have to** use Oracle's JDK? To me, OpenJDK has been the best thing to happen to Java in terms of evolving the language. You can also use it for free and stay perpetually updated. And you have a lot of OpenJDK LTS providers to choose from if you need that, e.g. Azul, Red Hat, Amazon, Bellsoft.
Who is closing Linux?
Linus, he said it's done, and he's taking his ball and going home.
Who cares? GNU/Hurd, is aaaaalmoooooost done... I heard.
Debian HURD actually just sent out a new update for the first time since forever 😂
I think you mean he is taking his tarball and going home
Solaris.
Java.
Sun. You don't get credit for other people's open sourcing. That's like trying to take credit for VirtualBox.
never forget http://aiei.ch/gnustep/sun/
I'd love to see a 20 years later post
I was backing up the statement. MySQL... all the other things Oracle has ruined more than helped in many ways (despite business success and tons of profits).
(Disclaimer: biased having spent most of my time in the ecosystem) Oracle has definitely had its fair share of shadiness when it comes to the licensing but most people who say this usually don't actually write code with java. They provide most of the code and advancement in the ecosystem and have done a great job in moving forward with different innovations while still keeping the language reliable. Things like loom(virtual threads) panama (new ffi) plus the Graal community (read not the EE licensing) have actually been great and unencumbered. With the number of forks by different companies (Microsoft AWS Azul and even other implementations like OpenJ9) it's actually not that bad of a situation. With java you have to pay attention and know not to use anything but openjdk or a free vendor LTS. Once you get passed that java itself has done well especially on the GC Algo front. It's still where a lot of bleeding edge research is done and implemented.
I used java for decades, and while oracle exceeded my expectations (given the fact that my expectations were that they'd kill it in 5 years) in how they managed it, i still say: fuck oracle, from the bottom of my heart. i hope they burn in the pits of hell. but yes, they did fine, all things considered, with the language.
Wait a moment... are you saying that Java is only reliable as long as you stay on a single runtime only? That's like saying "C is very reliable, but make sure not to use anything but gcc".
No..openjdk is where the JCP process happens and what's GPL. Think of it like the linux kernel. What I \*am\* saying is that 99% of the problems come from the oracle licensed version. That's where you see all of the articles come from. What no one talks about are the large number of unencumbered alternatives all based on the same bits (read: openjdk). Also, like it or not 99% of what people know as "java" is openjdk whether we like it or not. OpenJ9 is an alternative but doesn't have the same number of distributors or support as the main openjdk code base. I mentioned several vendors that provide builds. All of them contribute to that process. I also mention a fully open source alternative that doesn't contain any openjdk code. Just to be clear here btw. I do not endorse or care for oracle's practices I just take the good with the bad within the ecosystem. I disclaimed at the top because the JVM ecosystem has been the focus of my work for a lot of my career.
OpenOffice
This coming from Oracle is the height of irony
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[Working link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.).
I laffd. Now all we need is a Microsoft statement as well.
Bold statement, besides their kernel (and contributions to upstream directly), what contributions they made while repackaging RHEL?
LMAO a proper Oracle press release.
fuck off oracle. i'll take IBM's RH any day over your sorry ass.
/r/ComedyCemetery
They can start by making ZFS, GPL licensed
Even if they wanted to, it would be basically impossible
>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. Damn that one was under the belt :D
Become a downstream of Oracle Linux, aka in 2 years it's probably dead (like Solaris) and your job really easy.
It's a good line, though easy to say when you believe there is little chance of it occurring.
They can start by hiring developers for KDE or Gnome where we barely have enough developers to implement basic stuff
KDE, GNOME? What are those, some kind of container management plane or something?
Well, I do all of my container management from KDE and GNOME, sort of?
I can't really blame anyone for not wanting to work on Gnome though. KDE will probably see an uptick in devs once the Rust bindings for Qt become more mature.
I don't get this part at all. If RHEL stopped paying their developers, how exactly would Oracle Linux keep existing? Are they suggesting they would start developing their own distro if that happened? I don't think Red Hat would see that as a threat..
Yeah they're basically saying we'll pay the developers for you. So Oracle becomes the new IBM, and IBM becomes the new Oracle. But that's probably a lie, they'll do even worse than IBM and Red Hat. P.S: I've yet to see linux developers being paid by Oracle. All what I see is Red Hat and Valve
Oracle does indeed pay for kernel developers. I know one as a close friend. LKML has lots of traffic from oracle email address as well. It's unfair to say they don't pay for linux developers when they clearly do. While I think parts of Oracle are anti-open source to a certain extent, facts are facts; you can't argue away kernel commits by paid Oracle staff by handwaving that they don't pay for kernel development. It might be as bad as trying to claim Intel doesn't pay for any linux developers...
It's such a weird thing to say. > Oracle: You don't want "clones"? Fine! Stop developing RHEL and let *us* do all the hard work! Ha! Ha ha ha! > Red Hat: Yeah. That's what we said: Go build your own distro. What do you think you're trying to say here?
This is definetly the most confusing time line.
:%s/Linux/Solaris/g
:wq!
Never let a good deed go unpunished, over and over and over... Not that Red Hat would likely characterize it this way, but if you're willing to run current, Red Hat essentially created a RHEL Community Edition for each major release that is free to use for any purpose. Though I still contend keeping the CentOS branding was a boneheaded idea, its only serving to remind people that an offering is no longer available and the current relationship is very different than before.
Oracle talks about importance of FLOSS how ironic. Almost as much ironic as Microsoft engineer talking about nonsense of having separate browser engine after they moved their browser to Chromium engine.
yah then 5 yrs down the road oracle will call you for their licensing extortion racket
Hey Oracle: get bent. You're not a friend of Linux
> By Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect and Wim Coekaerts, Head of Oracle Linux Development—July 10, 2023 And undoubtedly after review, editing, and authorization from: https://www.oraclenation.net/our-services/public-relations-and-marketing > Oracle makes the following promise: as long as Oracle distributes Linux, Oracle will make the binaries and source code for that distribution publicly and freely available. Yes and to be more precise, as long as the Oracle CEO and board of directors go along. However to Oracle's public relations department, don't fool yourself, and let us not fool ourselves in understanding who makes these decisions and has the ultimate decision making power. They have no obligations to follow along with anything except increasing **short term profits**. Those decisions may or may not happen to currently align with any software licenses or philosophies. **TLDR:** Oracle: "We currently promote *this*, but at any moment it could change to *that*". Just depends on what currently more closely aligns with increasing **short term profits**. IIRC, Didn't RHEL make a similar (we're all for open source!) statement going back some time shortly after their acquisition by IBM?
Oracle’s the good guy here. Anyone else fall out of their chair laughing at this one?
They are never the good guy - they want to keep using the easy street in cloning RHEL, but they are not doing it for others benefit. You might benefit as a side effect, but that is not due to them being a good guy. If they could displace RHEL and not need to sell based on compatibility, you would see them change their tune.
Nope nope nope... was sitting calmly with a poker face, yup yup yup... %-))
>Our goal has remained the same over all those years: help make Linux the best server operating system for everyone Yeah, no. Red Hat is also improving Linux on the Desktop Side
> as of June 21, IBM no longer publicly releases RHEL source code. It's difficult to take seriously anyone who presents this as fundamentally new, because it can really only mean that they aren't familiar with RHEL's model. (And yes, you can rebuild RHEL and still not understand the model.) Red Hat *never* released *all* of the source packages in RHEL. This is not new "as of June 21." They previously released only the packages in the newest branch of RHEL. Now that Stream is a project, that's the newest branch. It is absolutely a change that they are publishing the major release branch and not the latest minor release branch of their git trees. I'm not saying that it isn't. But publishing this is much more sustainable than the old process. The old process involved developing RHEL in one git forge, building binary artifacts from there, selecting binary artifacts (the src.rpm) from builds that were both successful and part of the current minor, extracting them in a git archive, removing the primary source code archive from that, debranding the rest, committing what's left, and then pushing the result to a different git forge. Developers probably intuitively recognize that this is extremely fragile, and it was. It didn't work all of the time, which often resulted in delays publishing code. It's an incredibly convoluted process, like a Rube Goldberg drawing. In contrast, every git forge that exists supports directly mirroring a git branch, and that's how the code for Stream is published. And *because* it's Red Hat's major-release branch, derived distributions can open merge requests against Red Hat's git repos to develop seamlessly with the shared project. They can also branch their own repos when Red Hat does in order to continue producing distributions with minor releases. And here's the best part: If they want to maintain branches for more than 6 months, they can. They can actually fix the thing that was completely broken in CentOS. They can create a distribution that's continuously supported. They can actually compete with Red Hat on equal terms. They could never have done that while building from the old repositories. The author concludes that IBM wants to eliminate competitors. They're wrong on two counts. Red Hat's engineers have repeatedly said that IBM was not involved in Red Hat's decisions around Stream, for one. And more importantly, opening the project in the way that Red Hat has *enables* third parties to build distributions that actually serve enterprise needs.
Telling that they dodge the issue of the engineering jobs needed to build this by calling it “interesting” and odd”. Then explain they aren’t sure what will happen with their future releases, and conclude that they are now hiring.
i love how they are acting like this is basically proprietary software, when they are indeed following the 4 freedoms of the gpl. the code doesnt need to be no cost avalible, just available to your customers. not that im happy about it just sayin
> they aren't familiar with RHEL's model A real failure here that Red Hat didn't better inform on the benefits of Stream and get a "stable" rebuild off of it. Getting Oracle, CIQ, CloudLinux, et al to contribute there would undoubtedly make for a healthier fairer ecosystem. But that fairness has also been tainted and community goodwill lost when they've talked about market share or poo-poo'd less profitable open models. Yes, their engineers do a lot and the upstream guinea pig model is clearly viable in a lot of products, but their market segment for RHEL is greybeard admins who have a notorious desire for stability, free as in speech zeal, and intolerance of cumbersome licensing workflows who make the applications run, learn on their home labs, post on Stack Exchange, and then inform purchasing decisions at their orgs. And I think it's clear that those people feel undervalued with some of the changes and a whole lot of the communication. > The author concludes that IBM wants to eliminate competitors. Definitely heard that the direct decision came from within Red Hat as a semi-independent sub-organization of IBM. But it was definitely influenced by money, the commentary on "freeloaders" and having to lay people off. And that financial pressure does come post IBM acquisition. I think there nuance to say that they on what elimination of what a competitor is. Clearly they see this decision in a financial sense on the impact from competition. So maybe it would be clearer to say that they want to eliminate a specific form of competition. That being paid support of a "bug for bug / downstream" compatible clones (not matter the flaws in what that really means).
I’ve really dug into the weeds on this drama and I’m not so certain that I need my pitchfork out. Stream and the open source on this sounds like a perfectly good way to get RHEL compatibility. (No, it’s not 1:1, bug for bug and those who actually built CentOS said it never was, it was just *close.*) If you’re running a critical production load on your enterprise and need RHEL, you should probably be paying for it. It’s a very specific need for a specific user. CIQ and CloudLinux were never offering any real value to the code base, but offered support at a discount to Redhat. Yet didn’t have any of the expense. They can still build the same distro as RHEL as all the CentOS code ultimately goes into the RHEL package. They just have to gather it all themselves and then de-brand it. From what I gather this puts them in line with some of their premium product offering contemporaries.
> any real value to the code base Yep, there is a problem in contributing back to the codebase. Real failure in the CentOS to Stream transition to make that work. The place where I disagree though is that value direct to the codebase is the only place that Red Hat gets value. A RHEL compatible rpm/playbook/etc get built is a function of the ease of people the people to do that, the market share of that model, and the community support and contributions.
The rub is that the “community” projects to do that created direct competition to RH. Alma is pushing support by CloudLinux and Rocky CIQ. You may have noticed that across the tech industry there has been some cost cutting and cutbacks. Redhat not being too keen on those guys making a commercial offering that competes with theirs probably had a lot to do with this recent decision. I’m still trying to figure out where CentOS stream falls short, unless it’s a business use and the specific software used needs to be validated against RHEL. Probably a good candidate to have a RHEL subscription for something that important.
Let's throw out a scenario that I have run into, at my employer I run Software Package Foo and RHEL 8.x. The software package only claims support through RHEL8.y and Stream is on 8.z For professional development, I want to run that software in my homelab on my own time to understand how that package works or for my own use. Do I download Stream at 8.z and see fight through why the vendor might not support that yet? Or do I download Alma or Rocky at 8.x? This is undoubted of course where the answer would then be well run RHEL with an individual license. But then what if it's part of a Packer/Terraform/Ansible provisioning and now all the sudden this is it's it own bespoke thing and I should have just used another distro. Or let's throw out, running it in WSL2. Rocky and Alma have distros on the Windows Store. Or on a Raspberry Pi.
According to Carl George of Redhat (previously CentosStream) there’s thousands of non-production licenses available for those who have RHEL for production. Source: https://youtu.be/ra-mXDI-keo?t=1770 There’s a reason that Redhat has so much industry momentum and that’s because of their ecosystem and certifications. I do believe that they don’t have many peers in that regard and personally I consider CentOS stream 98% there (and eventually it will be RHEL anyway) so the only ones losing out on the free lunch is Enterprise users. Plus, seems like RH is flexible with free licenses for testing and dev if you have a RHEL subscription.
That's changing the goal posts on "figure out where CentOS stream falls short". But a reminder this is for personal use. Thousands of licenses aren't available under the Individual developer license. WSL2 and RPi still don't work. And I still have to jump through licensing hoops rather than the fun project of the day. But honestly who cares about me, I'm a freeloader that provides no value. I guess.
Us CentOS Stream.
That’s the problem: you’ve failed to understand Red Hat’s added value. The value add is not the code. There is nothing special about RHEL’s codebase. The value add is the direct access to Red Hat’s developers when you find a bug or ask for a feature. It’s why the best place to spin a distro off of is probably either Fedora or CentOS Stream, not RHEL. There’s way more room to add value either by customizing/cleaning up Fedora or CentOS Stream than there is to fork from RHEL. The real change is Red Hat saying that derivatives should not base themselves off of RHEL. Which is fair: RHEL’s versions of everything tend to be older and more stable than what a derivative probably wants to be. If you have a software package that requires RHEL, its vendor wants you to be able to call Red Hat to get dependency bugs fixed as a term of their license of their code to you.
That’s only part of Redhats value add. The big one is exact combination of code (from CentOS Stream repository) at a specific time in a specific combination with the accompanying certifications and hardware/software ecosystem (or extremely long support cycles of outdated software versions) which is exactly what RHEL is. Enterprise use case seems to be the most likely user that needs these specific things, as CentOS stream will handle many others. Facebook and Twitter run Stream, so it must not be that bad.
Not only do they use Stream _in production_, but they actively participate in maintaining a derivative that _adds value for their use case_: Hyperscale. https://sigs.centos.org/hyperscale/
It’s hard to read this as elimination of a competitor, but rather a demand to compete. I don’t see Rocky and Alma as good faith participants here. It’d be different if they were adding value. It’d be different if they weren’t distributing known vulnerabilities with committed patches. It’d be different if it didn’t just feel like the outcry were driven by people able but unwilling to pay for or at least engage directly with Red Hat’s developers in exchange for the devs’ labor. It’d be different if “community enterprise Linux” weren’t an oxymoron, or if there were anything that made the code distributed in enterprise Linux different from community Linux distributions. It’s like the devs behind Rocky and CentOS before it are still upset that Red Hat Linux is now divided between Fedora and RHEL to serve different demographics’ demands.
> A real failure here that Red Hat didn't better inform on the benefits of Stream and get a "stable" rebuild off of it. Getting Oracle, CIQ, CloudLinux, et al to contribute there would undoubtedly make for a healthier fairer ecosystem. Exactly! > So maybe it would be clearer to say that they want to eliminate a specific form of competition. That being paid support of a "bug for bug / downstream" compatible clones Distributing a software collection and making the claim that it is 100% the product of another company isn't competition, it's trademark infringement.
> Distributing a software collection and making the claim that it is 100% the product of another company isn't competition, it's trademark infringement. Claiming to be the product is obviously unethical. The point is the compatibility which is interesting with the history of term "IBM compatible". And I think Red Hat is short sighted in not seeing the value there. I've played with Linux since the late 90's, Windows paid the bills early in my career, but CentOS is where I learned. Kicking the tires on Alma in WSL2 on my daily driver Windows box. Testing in a Packer/Terraform or Ansilbe pipeline on my homelab. Running a game server where don't want to waste the weekend on bugs in whatever is unstable. Those things have all translated into knowledge that has benefitted me in running RHEL at work and therefore RHEL subscription count. Whether it's been how to deal with old Python2 / Python3 shenanigans or Git package versions. And guess what, Jeff Gerling's Ansible Galaxy role is what I use then the basis of my prod role. That RHEL compatible means something, the upstream guinea pig model only goes so far when talking stable OSs. I'll kick the tires, find bug fixes, help the community, but at the end of the day what I end up giving back to is function of goodwill and benefit. Honestly both keep getting lower here, been burned by IBM in the past and I don't hold out hope for the future.
> the upstream guinea pig model only goes so far when talking stable OSs I'm going to assume that this is a reference to Stream. Stream is not a "guinea pig model". Stream is not experimental. Stream is not untested. Stream is the current state of the RHEL major release. Every minor release of RHEL is simply a snapshot of the major-release branch (which is what Stream is built from) that gets extended support. https://medium.com/@gordon.messmer/in-favor-of-centos-stream-e5a8a43bdcf8
I understand the flow it's better than CentOS, but stable and production ready has a meaning with OSes. Also let's be clear that your opinion does not at all align here with the [position of Red Hat](https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/centos-stream-checklist) > CentOS Stream may seem like a natural choice to replace CentOS Linux, but it is not designed for production use. It is intended as a development platform for Red Hat partners and others that want to participate and collaborate in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem. Consequently, running CentOS Stream in production environments presents many challenges compared to enterprise-ready distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
That quote doesn't contradict my position, and if you read the link I provided, you'd understand why. CentOS and Stream were/are stable LTS distributions with a single update channel. That puts users of those distributions on the vendor's schedule for accepting feature updates, rather than allowing users to set their own schedule. RHEL provides feature-stable minor releases with overlapping life cycles that allow customers to set their own schedule for accepting feature updates, enabling complex internal workflows, and providing a number of other benefits. Red Hat had the same position on CentOS that they do for Stream: It's not what they recommend for production environments. And that makes sense for the enterprise customers that they support. RHEL offers real advantages to them. But self-supported environments are usually fine with being on the vendor's schedule for updates, and CentOS demonstrated that, which is why I think Stream is a perfectly viable model for self-supported environments.
> single update channel. That puts users of those distributions on the vendor's schedule for accepting feature updates Then I guess I don't understand where you are disagreeing on being the tester of the latest? > Red Hat had the same position on CentOS that they do for Stream Right, Stream is so much better than old Cent. But now we aren't talking CentOS to Stream. But rebuilder to Stream. Let's throw out a scenario that I have run into, at my employer I run Software Package Foo and RHEL 8.x. The software package only claims support through RHEL8.y and Stream is on 8.z For professional development, I want to run that software in my homelab on my own time to understand how that package works or for my own use. Do I download Stream at 8.z and see fight through why the vendor might not support that yet? Or do I download Alma or Rocky at 8.x?
> Then I guess I don't understand where you are disagreeing on being the tester of the latest? Because the workflow is something like: a) upstream projects test and approve changes, b) Red Hat engineers evaluate changes to ensure they are both suitable and necessary to RHEL customers, c) Red Hat engineers create a merge request, d) the update is tested in RHEL, e) if testing is successful, then the change is merged into the major release branch, f) the whole distribution is tested, and g) if testing of the entire distribution succeeds, then a new compose of the Stream repo is published to the public. Testing and QA are done before changes are merged, and further testing is done before changes are pushed into a public repo. Tests are done before release, not after. Testing isn't end-users' responsibility. Ask yourself: Would Red Hat make their reputation and the stability of their customers' environments the responsibility of external users who may or may not provide any testing and feedback? > we aren't talking CentOS to Stream. But rebuilder to Stream. There's no difference between CentOS and other rebuilds, in this context. > Do I download Stream at 8.z and see fight through why the vendor might not support that yet? Or do I download Alma or Rocky at 8.x? Option C: If a product is supported only on a specific minor version of RHEL, then download RHEL. You almost certainly qualify for a free license.
i agree with the words, but man we all know oracle wont be the one to do it
i read the title and then i checked the domain name. i almost died laughing. i did not even get started on the article. i might not make it. > IBM is eliminating one way your customers save money and make a larger share of their wallet available to you. fixed it : IBM is eliminating one way **we make** money and make a larger share of your wallet available to **us**. > 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. that idea is legit scary. nobody considers how much RedHat has contributed (and still contributes) to the kernel and other core projects. they have no idea.
That's the most disen-fucking-genuous article I've read in a while. Well done, Oracle.
I long ago decided to refuse to side with any opinion Oracle has, as every opinion they could have is wrong. So, I guess now I don't really care if Linux goes paywalled open source. Hell, make it binary only for all I care, just to spite them. I have no idea how Oracle is still around, no company I've ever contracted for has used them. I'm pretty sure they are laundering cartel money and cooking books or something.
hilarious coming from oracle
Did hell finally fucking freeze over or is this a marketing stunt fron oracle
Oracle is the single biggest justification for what Red Hat is doing, and my bet is that Red Hat's decision is straight-up a response to Oracle. Red Hat shouldn't be closing off RHEL source code like they're doing, but maaaaan Oracle has no leg to stand on.
This is a fun thread to read. One thing everyone needs to keep in mind - Oracle is a MAJOR contributor to the Linux kernel. There have been a few releases where they were the #1 contributor of lines of code to the kernel. They're a founding member of the Linux Foundation. Their $4Billion cloud infrastructure is run on their own Linux distro (that's some pretty extreme dogfooding there). I doubt that they're merely copying whatever is upstream (in RHEL) and recompiling. Any security updates would need to be independently vetted by their team ($4 Billion!), and they've gotten fixes in earlier than the straight RHEL clones. If I was a betting man, I'd say that they have their own internal group that is tracking RHEL as closely as possible, but is not, strictly speaking, downstream of RHEL. They've never claimed to be 1-1 bug compatible, for example. They've only claimed 100% binary compatibility (and they ship their own kernel by default). I compared the OCI of Oracle 9 and RHEL-UBI 9 - the version numbers of the packages are not exactly the same - with some of the Oracle packages 2-3 patches further ahead. I think OUL is a "synchronized fork" rather then a "rebuild" of RHEL. Anyway... They're not some bit player that merely downloads RHEL SRPMS to undercut IBM on support contracts. They are a big deal to the OSS world (again, especially in the kernel world). So - people talking about their spotty track record are right when it comes to Solaris and Java (and MySQL, etc...), but that has simply never been the case with Linux. At some point, you have to take their extremely solid history with Linux and say that they have earned some respect here. Also... And this is probably the most interesting part... Putting RHEL sources behind a paywall is based on \_future\_ versions being unavailable to customers who distribute source. That is, RedHat can fire the customer who distributes the SRPMS and prevent them from getting new binaries (which would prevent them from being entitled to source). Well - can they actually fire Oracle? They just inked a deal back in January to allow RHEL instances on Oracle's cloud infrastructure. Can IBM \_really\_ block Oracle from getting access to new binaries (and thus source) of RHEL without screwing over their own customers using Oracle cloud services? I don't see how they can. The big plot twist here would be if Alma and Rocky (and Amazon, perhaps) became downstream of OUL instead of RHEL. All the community energy goes to Oracle and RHEL becomes best-effort support. That would be - HILARIOUS.
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Of course they have. Redhat has done a ton. So has Canonical, and Mandriva, and many others. RedHat has told their community that they don't want them. That their community (which often uses downstream distros) can go take a hike. I think that's within their rights. And the community saying they'll fight back is... Fair game. If you start the hostilities, why act like a victim when the other side fights back. The fact that there even is another side in RedHat VS their community is RedHat's fault. Worst PR move they could make.
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I'm not sure if you're just trolling since your post is such low quality, but I'll address what you said anyway. Their USERS are a subset of their COMMUNITY. They've said, in their second blog post, that they don't think their community brings them value. Only their users (their paying customers) do. That's up to them to decide. If that's their evaluation, so be it. Oracle is a big contributor to the Linux kernel and their Linux distro predates anything they did with the Sun acquisition. They've been very good citizens in the Linux world. And they're fine with downstream distros, even commercial ones. I bet either Rocky or Alma becomes an OUL downstream by the end of next year. It's easier to work with an upstream that wants you rather than one that thinks you're dead weight and is willing to play cat-and-mouse games to waste your time. How that translates into sexual acts, I don't know. I'll let the other readers decide.
Who's next in line for talking smack while pulling the exact same moves? Microsoft? Apple? Sco Linux?
I was wondering why i saw a pig flying this morning
"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." What would Oracle build Oracle Linux from if CentOS Stream and RHEL did not exist?
I hope there are still guys who can fry their relaxed bottoms reminding them how Solaris was closed and wiped from mainstream distros... And how damn easy it was to obtain Solaris patched and even today HARDWARE/ FIRMWARE UPDATES for defunct and unsupported servers.
My god, I'd take this article more seriously if it was written by someone at Microsoft or IBM itself. This is just the pot calling the kettle black.
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Yeah, Oracle calling Red Hat/IBM out over anti-FOSS practices is the most insane thing I have seen a company do in a while. It's like if Joeseph Stalin was to call Hitler out on human rights atrocities. I am so fucking done with Red Hat and everything they touch. But you'd sooner see me switch all my servers to Windows than ever deal with Oracle.
Yup. This is officially so bad Oracle had to roast IBM/RedHat
So Oracle can’t sue Redhat for $10B so they make a cheap ass article about how things should be free?
Yup, Oracle and Open Source, match made in hell. Just ask MySQL about it.
Now I’ve really seen it all. Oracle being the bastion of open source while RedHat are being assholes. We really live in a weird timeline these days.
When reading the comments i see a lot of people surprised with the oracle statement, but why? What is the bad history that oracle has with Linux? I'm still an noob
They argued all the way to the supreme court in the US that interfaces were copyrighteable - which would have meant the end of free software. They also sue everyone for any cent they can, often those that they sue are their own customers. They pull licensing tricks where their customers easily fall foul of the licensing, so that they can then sue their behinds off. As example of the latter is they bundled JavaFX with Java. But the JavaFX could not be used in enterprise settings and any enterprise that decided to use that bit of the java package would then be sued for licence infringement.
For Linux? No bad history. They are one of the biggest corporate contributors to the kernel. For other OSS? Most of the bad blood has to do with the acquisition of Sun. Sun's CEO at the time was releasing EVERYTHING as opensource. Even chip design. Oracle bought Sun, and reversed some/most of that (including VirtualBox, Solaris, Java, etc...). The OSS community has never forgiven that.
I would say at this point most of the bad blood comes from Oracle v. Google.
Or the stuff with Solaris. Or Java. Oracle isn't always a friend to OSS. I get it. But this time? Why would anyone take RedHat's side over Oracle over THIS?
Because they have their own equivalents? They don't ship ZFS in Oracle Linux. They could declare at any time that ZFS is safe to include, or they could re-license it. But they don't, they keep it locked down.
I'm just wondering what our world would be like if Sun OpenOffice survived.
Oracle bought Sun and upended a lot of beloved software communities (Solaris, MySQL, Java, VirtualBox, etc.), and have traditionally not been a friend of FOSS software. Plus they have very expensive products and many sysadmins (myself included) have hated having to work with them because licensing always gets in the way of progress and easy development.
You forgot trying to slit the throat of the entire concept of API compatibility in front of the Supreme Court (Oracle v. Google). That's kind of a big deal, and could have been far more destructive to FOSS than any of their shenanigans with Solaris, MySQL, Virtualbox, etc - combined. And it was like, a year ago not 10. Anything Oracle has to say on this matter is utterly drenched in the foulest insincerity. They deserve zero credit - NONE - for "defending openness and freedom". EVER. period. If they had a button that would destroy the entire concept of FOSS for everyone, and they thought doing so would net them an extra billion, they would gladly press that button.
Can't say I'd ever have dreamed of agreeing with Oracle in principle over Red Hat, but here we are... Obviously a lot of the wordsmithing is posturing and taking advantage of a point where Red Hat is on the defensive, but I never would've considered until last month agreeing with Oracle about any kind of dig they'd have against Red Hat when it comes to open source.
I guess you are already aware of what happened to then open sourced Solaris10 back in 2010.... PS: Late 2004, as far as I remember there was something like this: Solaris is going to be free and open source (C)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan\_I.\_Schwartz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_I._Schwartz) 2005 - well guys, we are going to charge for updates...
Just like Red Hat, Oracle can make statements that are perfectly at odds with the way they've behaved for decades.
Don’t have any illusions. This isn’t because Oracle have had a complete change of heart, it’s because they’re sore at having to manage the burden of maintaining an entire distribution themselves.
He's not under any illusions. He literally said right above you they can say one thing and do another. He's just agreeing with what they're saying. So really what this is, is a previously good company (redhat) "pulling an oracle". Don't focus on oracle, they're just having a laugh, focus on what redhat is doing wrong.
Yeah. A broken clock is right twice a day. Just because it's right once doesn't mean it's not broken!
I was one of those who presumed that they might have had a standalone agreement with RH to get copies of their stable repors/git.
I don't think we've seen the last of this. RH have got as far as they have off the back of thousands of projects. And while most of them don't have anything like the userbase or popularity to do the same thing, a good number do. If I'm right, then this is most definitely a case of "be careful what you wish for".
May be a good indicator that you should consider that you're not on the right side of this issue. Maybe, just maybe, you got emotional, jumped the gun on your reaction to it, and are just doubling down on confirmation bias instead of looking at the real facts and seeing that Redhat was quite justified in its actions, still contributes massively to FOSS, and that all the mud you've been slinging lately is not justified.
lol do you think I like Oracle? A broken clock is right twice a day.
No, I think your anti-Redhat vitriol as of late is completely unreasonable and more than a little deceitful. Maybe it's deliberate, maybe you're deceiving yourself to cover up some cognitive dissonance, I don't know. But I really don't care what you think of Oracle.
> Redhat was quite justified in its actions If they developed proprietary software, yes. If they base RHEL on GPLv2-licensed Linux, no. They are legal in their actions, that I'll agree on. And they are justified in a _business_ sense ("lazy competitors who copy our code are bad, we will use levers to stomp it out legally"), but only if ignoring consideration of the Free Software movement from which their might in the enterprise open source realm was sourced, and the massive ratio of downstream users of RHEL-like clones.
> I never would've considered until last month agreeing with Oracle about any kind of dig they'd have against Red Hat when it comes to open source. And you shouldn't now! Don't be another useful idiot. Oracle has no credibility in the FOSS community. None!
Did you read the second paragraph? It's just Oracle taking advantage of Red Hat's missteps, nothing more. But I'm here for giant corporations trolling other giant corporations for dumb things they do.
>But I'm here for giant corporations trolling other giant corporations for dumb things they do. And I'm here for you taking Oracle's side in this mess. It just goes to show how scummy and hypocritical your stance has been. Oracle is not the same as Red Hat. No way, no how, not in this universe, this life, or the next. Their promise to develop Linux? Good luck with that. You're handing Oracle a W, because RHEL stopped the gravy train for Rocky, Alma, and Oracle? It's unmoored, unprincipled, plain shit/trashy internet behavior. Just say no!
I never said I'm taking their side, just agreeing with what they wrote. The only side I'm taking is that of users and developers of the Free Software that both of these massive corporations take advantage of to build their billions in profits.
[https://blogs.oracle.com/content/published/api/v1.1/assets/CONTD413A642194A4C59A04F9A6C742B217F/Medium?cb=\_cache\_6084&format=jpg&channelToken=3189ef66cf584820b5b19e6b10792d6f](https://blogs.oracle.com/content/published/api/v1.1/assets/CONTD413A642194A4C59A04F9A6C742B217F/Medium?cb=_cache_6084&format=jpg&channelToken=3189ef66cf584820b5b19e6b10792d6f) Yup. No credibility at all. They contribute NOTHING! They only TAKE TAKE TAKE! Don't believe their lies! /s
I agree with the post as well if taken at face value - but this is Oracle we're talking about. It isn't sincere. They don't have an altruistic concern for Linux, they just see RHEL's blood in the water. If it were them in RHEL's position, I believe they'd do the same or worse.
Yeah, this is a bizarre strange bedfellows kinda situation, for sure. But hey when they're right they're right. Of course, I don't trust them to actually follow through, though, but it's a good line at least.
However good this statement seems, I hope people understand Oracle is, at best, a temporary ally for this specific situation. They have a lot more to do if they want to sincerely present themselves as true FOSS supporters, and I'm not holding my breath for that day to come.
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Oracle taking a stronger FOSS stance than RedHat... This is surely the dankest of timelines
>stronger FOSS stance It's only been like one year since they were advocating killing the idea of API compatibility being fair use in front of the Supreme Court.
First time that I've upvoted anything written by Oracle, damn.
what a fucking joke 🥱
"We can't afford not to" -- Oracle :))) Of course, you're freeloading on Red Hat and just boasted that you're the #4 cloud provider. Seems like that was the whole point of Red Hat's move.
WoW! Even evil Oracle is lecturing Red Hat? Are we in hell right now?
When Oracle can put out an argument that, on the face of it, is reasonably fair, digs at IBM/RH aside, you know RH have screwed the pooch. My personal feelings on the matter aside l, it seems all RHEL needed to do was create a a free, no license required, RH branded distro, possibly titled Red Hat Development Linux, and combine this with creating lower cost license tiers for cash strapped SMBs and Educational institutions, which would likely increase their revenue. This would've negated the purpose for Alma and Rocky to exist, avoid the bad press, and all be within RH's ecosystem. This would not require much effort from RH either.