Yeah this is just opportunistic PR. Oracle cares less about Open Source than even the most brain dead Red Hatter. As with all things Oracle, they are taking the angle that potentially creates a revenue opportunity for themselves. This is fine. I get it but doing it under the guise of higher open source ideals is comically transparent. Their OEL market share mostly consists of them targeting specific Red Hat accounts and severely undercutting RHEL costs (since Red Hat incurs significantly more development burden and costs) and using it as a launch pad to embed myriad other Oracle products within the customer ecosystem. Other products that conveniently aren’t grounded in their supposed open source ideals.
Oracle actually does not undercut the least expensive Red Hat support offerings. Oracle Linux support is $499/year for basic, and $1,399/year for premier. Both tiers allow 24x7 access to file service requests (SRs).
Red Hat has a more complicated support structure, starting with workstation-self support: $179, workstation-8x5 support: $299, server-self support: $349, server-8x5 support: $799, server-24x7 support: $1,299.
It would be interesting if IBM did exactly what this Oracle blog suggests:
"Finally, to IBM, here’s a big idea for you. You say that you don’t want to pay all those RHEL developers? Here’s how you can save money: just pull from us. Become a downstream distributor of Oracle Linux. We will happily take on the burden."
* Oracle killed OpenOffice (after refusing to hand grant trademarks & related IP to the community until it was too late - well after LibreOffice replaced it on most distros, then dumped it on the Apache Project).
* Oracle killed Hudson (after refusing to hand grant trademarks & related IP to the community until it was too late - well after Jenkins had replaced it on the market, then dumped it on the Apache Project).
* Oracle attempted to make case law such that APIs fall under copyright. Oracle appealed Google v. Oracle all the way up to SCOTUS. Since countless open source projects are re-implement proprietary APIs (e.g. S3 protocol, Wine/Proton), and adverse ruling would have been catastrophic.
They care so much for open source that they instantly killed OpenSolaris even if that led to much of the team quitting.
They also very much care to create an open and competitive environment, that's why their reps repeatedly refused to sell us licenses to have Solaris run under VMWare ESXi, demanding we replace our ESXi deployments with... VirtualBox (no, really).
Honestly, what was the point of continuing to fund OpenSolaris? Tiny market share, no prospects for improvement. They're already funding a different open source operating system.
Caring about open source isn't about funding infinite options everywhere.
They kept developing and selling Solaris and OpenSolaris kept the team happy. I doubt it was going to be that expensive on their part, especially if they could use Solaris sales to fund it.
Also part of OpenSolaris was OpenZFS, used in many NAS systems worldwide. When they killed OpenSolaris the ZFS people also left Oracle.
> Oracle does care about open source, to the extent that they have been the top Linux kernel contributor several times.
Back when I worked for Huawei, we regularly figured in the list of top contributors to the Linux kernel each cycle. I never got the impression that Huawei cares about open source. It was just a pragmatic, disinterested business decision.
Based on your provided links the apples to apples comparison for RHEL Server Standard Support ($799) would be the Oracle Basic Support ($499)
Also, considering that OEL is downstream from RHEL how sustainable do we really think it would be for RHEL to downstream from OEL? How long would OEL invest and maintain in OS components that don’t directly benefit their specific offerings? Is there evidence to suggest there is any truth behind that offer? In my years of following the Linux ecosystem Oracle’s niche seems to have largely evolved around performance optimizations that solve specific problems they experience with other products or feature enhancements to facilitate new developments within their product ecosystem (which is still great for the community!) but what I have not seen is general purpose stewardship of the ecosystem of packages outside the kernel. I have no doubts they have made contributions of that nature but that has certainly not been a constant in what I have personally observed thus far. Perhaps I’m looking in the wrong places but I genuinely don’t believe Oracle would truly take on that responsibility nor do I believe that they would be anywhere near as effective as Red Hat at executing it
Oracle does maintain Solaris, which would seem to me to entail a much larger support burden than Red Hat's stewardship of their enterprise Linux distribution.
Oracle also ships a few Linux userspace utilities outside of the main yum repos; the btrfs utilities come to mind. There really isn't any obvious btrfs performance need within Oracle or its products, which runs contrary to the spirit of your observations; in fact the Oracle database is explicitly not supported on btrfs.
Note 2290489.1: "Oracle DB has specifically said that they do not support using BTRFS filesystems... BTRFS is optimized for non-database workloads."
I will also somewhat agree with you in circumspection on the quality of Oracle's 24x7 support. I have endured frustrating delays on SRs for various reasons, and have been forced to escalate in the past. I don't know if IBM's $1,299 24x7 support is good, but I can say that Oracle's has been astonishingly bad - be prepared to escalate, which usually moves things along.
I think that, if IBM decided to let go of all of their RHEL developers, Oracle is certainly capable of assuming this burden.
> Oracle does maintain Solaris, which would seem to me to entail a much larger support burden than Red Hat's stewardship of their enterprise Linux distribution.
This seems like a non-sequitur in a conversation about open-source OSes.
I do not understand how, as Solaris was open previous to Oracle's acquisition.
Red Hat does not maintain all of the code in RHEL - they repackage and patch everything taken from other developers. Very few packages are authored solely by them.
I don't know what relationship Oracle has with the current owner of the UNIX System V source (appears to be The Open Group), but Oracle is responsible for vastly more of the kernel and userspace in Solaris than RHEL.
> Red Hat does not maintain all of the code in RHEL - they repackage and patch everything taken from other developers.
This is false. Red Hat does maintain code that is shipped by default with RHEL. It should be noted though, the number of packages that are part of default RHEL installation is small. Also upstream first policy basically means, any proposed patch must first be merged in upstream before being backported to rhel. If that does not make them maintainers, I don't know what will. Being sole author and maintainer are not the same thing.
> Oracle does maintain Solaris, which would seem to me to entail a much larger support burden than Red Hat's stewardship of their enterprise Linux distribution.
Solaris was effectively killed off in 2017 when Oracle laid off most people working on it. And Open Solaris is dead too.
Rumours of our death are, as ever, greatly exaggerated. We continue to maintain the core OS facilities provided by illumos and the organisations behind distributions like SmartOS and OmniOS continue to ship maintained, supported software to a mixture of community and commercial users.
>"Finally, to IBM, here’s a big idea for you. You say that you don’t want to pay all those RHEL developers? Here’s how you can save money: just pull from us. Become a downstream distributor of Oracle Linux. We will happily take on the burden."
Anybody who watched what Oracle did to OpenSolaris after the Sun acquisition who does this might as well start planning for their alternate product launch right now because they're gonna need it when Oracle changes direction.
> Oracle does care about open source, to the extent that they have been the top Linux kernel contributor several times.
Linux kernel is not entirety of Linux. Given that there is Oracle cloud and various hardware Oracle has to support, it will be almost unthinkable if Oracle did not contribute to Linux kernel.
But - I will be interested in Oracle's support for broader Linux ecosystem. How about contributions to GCC, Gnome (or any other DE as a matter of fact), Wayland/xorg etc? Oracle strictly contributes to projects from which it can benefit immediately.
Technically, yes, it is. "Linux" refers to the kernel, not to all of the other stuff you need on top of the kernel for a fully-formed OS. Although "Linux" is not used in that sense in the world at large anymore.
But this distinction is why you see some people mentioning that you should say "Gnu/Linux" and the like when referring to the OS as whole.
I will say that Oracle does contribute to gcc, gdb, and other parts of the GNU tool chain. I interviewed a few years ago with the team that does it. I don’t know how large the contributions are, but they seem super passionate about what they do and believe strongly in giving back
They might have an occasional commit or two but clearly they can't stand behind their own promise of developing/supporting an EL distro the way Red hat does. I also don't see it changing tbh. I don't see troves of Open source engineers at Red Hat(or other companies) making a bee line for joining Oracle.
It takes people a long time to readjust preconceptions. Microsoft was the big bad for most of my life, but it took ~8 years after Ballmerś retirement for people to start noticing Microsoftś prestigious opensourcing, interesting cloud offerings etc. where itś now a commonplace that they've improved. Fascinating really.
Oracleś got quite the history, but they have been supporting Linux and Java well and killing Solaris was a segue into Linux too, ergo more open.
To answer your question specifically, I'm used to "English (intl, with AltGr dead keys)" but in Linux Mint there are like 20 options. I was trying "US, intl, AltGr Unicode combining" or perhaps "US, intl, with dead keys" or such. (I've tried about a dozen in the last 2 days.) Instead of an apostrophe, they were generating what could become an accent mark, a stress mark or diacritic depending on the next letter. On "with AltGr dead keys" you must use right alt+apostrophe for that effect. (The quotation marks would do the same thing.)
Anyway, the keyboard lets me type things like þðßáœßðfhëü´6´^¨¼²³¤` with 2 buttons like shift to make a capital! This is good for German, Spanish and French, but Hungarian and Romanian require 3 buttons, then a 4th which is more tedious.
left alt shift 5 = ş ţ romanian
left alt shift 3 = ā lines for latin
left alt shift 2 = ű ő - hungarian long umlaut
On some keyboard layouts, pressing the quote mark starts a modifyer and then depending on the layout the following character is combined with the quote mark. Most English layouts don't include ś in this, but some Eastern European (?) languages use that character more often and so include them in this modifyer shortcut.
Oracle has got the history and continues the same history, including the lawyers.
You know why? The entire business is a cult structured around their majority owner, Larry who has never stepped away from the business.
Back when Oracle came out with that blog article I tried to recreate the results showing that they were indeed the top contributor. I have no idea what metric they use, but it must be something very specific.
And to be fair, Oracle has been a remarkably good steward of Java. It's truly amazing how fast and far Java has come since the Java 7 and Java 8 days. It's been on a rocket sled of development, while still being shockingly well behaved for earlier code. If there's any critique, it's "too fast". But that's nonsense, since the LTS work helps maintain stability.
And it's pretty wide open. They keep some things close to their vest, which is their prerogative, but even some of that stuff has been opening up over time as well.
It's not been a seamless transition, but it's not been awful either. Developers are managing.
How Oracle handles Java (business-wise, not in technological terms) is one of the things that tells me that Oracle is still the toxic company it's always been.
They also buried a call home into the VBox Guest Extensions and eventually started sending legal demands to companies as well. Because while VBox was open license, the VBox Guest Extensions have a non-commercial use license by default but that doesn't stop VBox from asking you to install them innocently on the first run.
Also 3 years ago, the guy in charge of a Oracle database we had (now migrated to MSSQL) accidentally downloaded the wrong Oracle database software from their portal. It turns out Oracle just lets you download any variant in their portal and then just send you legal demands for payment when you accidentally use a higher tier than you licensed. Something they can absolutely fix themselves to prevent. Of course we told them to fuck off since we didn't use any feature specific to the other tier and deployed the correct variant.
Assuming that you are using the Standard Edition/2 of the database, this is licensed at $17,500/core. On x86, there is a 2-for-1 core discount.
If you download Enterprise Edition and use it to perform an upgrade from your SE2 database, then you will then be on the hook for the full $47,500/core.
There are two ways to undo this license change. a) Run "catdwgrd.sql" to get back to the SE2 release, then upgrade again with the correct license, or b) unload all of the data in the database (via exp/imp or data pump), then load it into a new database that is created with the correct license.
Staying on an EE database will certainly place you on the new pricing tier.
> They also buried a call home into the VBox Guest Extensions
This is incorrect and actively misleading, because you are conflating 2 different things.
The Virtualbox Guest Additions are 100% FOSS and are included in many distros, including Ubuntu -- `apt install -y virtualbox-guest-x11` -- as well as being an optional extra with VirtualBox itself as an ISO file.
The point of using setAccessible with reflection was to access private fields and methods, and the module features in Java 9 made that impossible without passing a gigantic list of command-line flags to every invocation of Java.
I agree with your blind hatred of Oracle. But you have to admit, this is pretty epic inter-company trolling, and what Oracle says in its post is basically right.
> 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.
It's nice to see big companies trolling each other.
IANAL, but if I recall correctly part of having a trademark is having a legal obligation to enforce it, and if I'm reading the tweet correctly this is a name of a company and typically one cannot use a trademark in their company name.
Oracle can grant others the use of their trademark legally, right? There's no reason Oracle couldn't say this?
> JavaScript is our trademark, you must either stop using it immediately OR <sign this online form here> to enter into an agreement with us that grants you the ability to use it, for as long as you please, no strings attached, no payment required.
> Oracle can grant others the use of their trademark legally, right? There's no reason Oracle couldn't say this?
Correct, with certain limitation[1]. This fact is why saying "but we have to do this or lose our trademark" is a bit disingenuous. You do have to actively defend your trademark or lose it (because a trademark is not intended to benefit the company holding it, it's intended as a consumer protection measure). But "defending your trademark" doesn't mean you have to engage in a lawsuit.
[1] The limitations are around the purpose of trademark as consumer protection measure. The idea is that consumers can rely on the trademark as a guarantee that a product or service is coming from who they think it's coming from. It's possible to be so liberal in licensing the use of your trademark out that it gets diluted enough to risk losing the registration.
>>Oracle just sent a legal threat to "Rust for Javascript" to remove "Javascript" from their name.
Bullshit.
As a Reddit comment pointed out, they sent the legal notice because the person had Javascript in their Limited Company, not because they were selling a Javascript course. You can't create a Limited company violanting someone's trademark.
And in fact there are dozens of Javascript courses online
This could be totally well intentioned and completely honest but no one would believe it anyway. Oracle has burnt so many bridges I'm not sure it could ever recover reputationally from it. It's always about more than just the technology. Reputation will play a large part in anyone's decision making.
Worse, I find myself applauding the devil for their championing Open Source! This is Oracle! The lawnmower[0]! The company that killed OpenSolaris! What mad world is this!?
I think like, a big part of this was Solaris has near zero chance of gaining headshare among people who need Unix. Solaris has value for customers with vendor lock in, and its a declining revenue source which can be ridden out for a decade or two, and then discontinued.
Yeah, probably the consistent way to explain it is that Oracle thought they could get away with it for Solaris but the market of Linux distros is quite healthy and they don't have the power to pull the same thing so they push the other angle instead.
That's exactly right; I was surprised way back when that Linux wasn't cutting into the Windows marketshare very much at all, despite all the noise and fury coming from Redmond, but it was absolutely decimating big iron UNIX.
Windows was already on low-margin consumer x86 boxes so there wasn't the same opportunity.
Linux enabled commodity hardware to eat Big Iron's lunch using that same x86. Dell and IBM certainly made a good business filling datacenter racks with their x86 offerings for quite some time.
Free software works in part because it forces us, consumers, developers, businesses, into a better optimum than an a proprietary ecosystem. And that makes it work because it aligns incentives of self interested companies with keeping it open as we're seeing here.
Big tech companies have a history of supporting the community where doing so attacks their competitors’ cash cows.
There’s also that Oracle linux was formed from RHEL.
Maybe let’s not confuse Oracle undermining their competitor’s moat with their genuinely being on the side of the community.
It’s been a while, but the necessity of MariaDB and Percona also seem to show that Oracle’s been very much on the other side of this kind of move in the past.
> 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.
I'd love for Red Hat to call Oracle's bluff, but it would never happen.
Oracle's definitely been on the wrong side of these arguments for long enough that I wouldn't give the benefit of the doubt.
This. It's more like a happy accident. If Oracle had a stated principle which was virtuous, and did something to specifically to uphold that principle when anyone else might have done something else, that would be something you thank them for. And this is not that.
However there is also another idea that I think is valid, which is "reward the behavior you want to see". Whyever they did it, if it's good, you let them know that you want that and you don't burn them the one time they do something you always say you want.
I still don't thank them though. There is no reasonable hope of ever influencing Oracle to become something 100% the opposite of what they are at their very core. So F them. I see no point in worrying about failing to reward the behavior you want to see in this case. You will never get the behavior you really want out of Oracle, and so all you would be doing is letting them influence you, not you influencing them.
> However there is also another idea that I think is valid, which is "reward the behavior you want to see"
Yes, I agree with this as well. It's all complicated.
Oracle only cares about one thing: profits. So any meaningful way of rewarding their behavior would have to come in the form of giving them more money. Every dollar you spend is, after all, a vote telling the entity you gave the dollar to to keep on doing whatever it is they're doing.
This one fairly self-serving press release isn't enough for me to give Oracle any money, though. I don't think they'd take the right lesson from it. Especially because I'm not the sort of big spender that Oracle really cares about.
Oracle is not, has never been, and never will be a champion or leader in Open Source. Oracle has obligations they need to adhere to in the short term regarding F/LOSS licenses - though the end goal is _always_ extortion.
Oracle owns some great tech, they have always had great engineers. Oracle has ALWAYS leveraged their technology to prop up their protection racket. I'm constantly astonished they haven't violated RICO enough to free that Hawaiian island Uncle Larry bought, even considering their In-Q-Tel roots.
> 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.
Not only is this a brilliant troll, it's also true. Oracle could easily take this on if it's such a burden for IBM.
They really couldn't. If you've ever worked with OEL in any technical capacity you can kinda tell Oracle doesn't have a shred of the Linux expertise that Red Hat does. They can report to upstream (RHEL) but that's about it. It's trite and funny of them to troll IBM but it's a laughable idea. If Red Hat were to take them up on it it would be a disaster within probably weeks.
The decision by Red Hat/IBM here is incredibly shortsighted and stupid.
That's what I like about it. It sounds like a startup calling out a bigger competitor for anti-competitive behavior. (Ironic that it's coming from Oracle, but that's also what gives it some teeth!)
They don't care. Some accountant somewhere probably did a really simple calculation and figured they'd sell more into their captive clients than they'd lose to other distributions this way and they called the shot.
> 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.
100% PR. They know Red Hat will not actually do it so why not offer for PR points.
Yes, Oracle is evil overall, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I'm totally on their side on this issue, just like even though Amazon is evil overall, I'm totally on their side with OpenSearch.
It's RHEL. Or rather, it's CentOS with the serial numbers filed off.
Of course you can. It is a snapshot of an old version of Fedora, with a lot of extra Q&A, and an extremely restricted set of packages. E.g. you get GNOME and nothing else.
But if you don't need many drivers, or you're running on old hardware that is directly supported, sure you can run it as a desktop.
> we certify Oracle software products on RHEL even though they are built and tested on Oracle Linux only, never on RHEL
Okay, that's honestly really interesting, and that is quite a statement on their compatibility. I guess it saves them money on licensing and also sends a message.
Red Hat 5.0 (Hurricane) was my first-ever open source operating system. If you'd told me, 25 years ago, that one day Red Hat would withhold source from the Linux community, and that Oracle would be the champion of contributing back, I never would have believed you.
This feels a little bit like when Ahmadinejad called out Putin for being a tyrannical narcissist.
This is wonderful trolling on the part of Oracle, I bet they had a lot of fun composing this piece. I just wish they tossed in "We stand by GNU/Linux"[0] - that would be the frosting on the cake.
[0] Yeah, I realize that would be difficult - both IBM and Oracle hate FSF equally.
You are totally free to not like IBM and I won't try to change your mind, but please read up on IBMs involvement in linux, open source, open source stewardship, apache, linux foundation SCO vs IBM, IBMs no attack pledge against Linux (2004), Linux S390, 1000s of developers getting paid to contribute to open source, istio to just name a few.
The reality is not as black and white as you make it out to be.
Thank you for taking the time to respond. For me there was one decisive moment that changed my perspective on IBM: when they joined the recent crusade against Stallman.
You see, when Red Had started, they very much needed our (let's call it 'Linux community') help. At the beginning people made fun of RH, there were jokes running it's for the people who can't really use Linux, their initial security history was quite bad etc. It was unthinkable that at the time of Bob Young etc. they could attack RMS (and he wasn't much different then, maybe worse even in social terms), not to mention the fact that they were making money selling the software that he inspired to create or just created. Now that the power balance shifted, they felt more courageous and decided to follow the hating crowd. When you think about it a bit, it's really sad.
After Selam Gano's hate piece there was a crusade against RMS, with many media outlets repeating untrue information ("Stallman defends Epstein" etc.). And then Red Hat/IBM decided to chime in. In spite of the fact they had been profiting from his work and will continue to do so.
Historically, RMS and RH had good relations, though:
> From a practical standpoint, we believe Oracle Linux will remain as compatible as it has always been through release 9.2, but after that, there may be a greater chance for a compatibility issue to arise. If an incompatibility does affect a customer or ISV, Oracle will work to remediate the problem.
> 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.
Well to some extent, Redhat got what it wanted, clones are starting to contribute rather than just cloning, with stream becoming the center of it all.
Cloudlinux did the same thing, they are hiring and starting to diverge from just being a RHEL clone.
I mean, it's the GNU General Public License that is largely at play here. That's not the GNU part that most people refer to, but neither is it really the "Linux" kernel part that's central to the argument either.
Only reason Oracle even has a Linux version is to sell their db. Why not take more of the customer's money while they are at it while stealing another's OS and renaming it as your own.
