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.
https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/oracle-is-the-1-contribu...
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).
https://www.oracle.com/linux/support/
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.
https://www.redhat.com/en/store/linux-platforms
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."