7 ms·

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

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.

geerlingguy 3y ago
"A broken clock is right twice a day," something like that.
chasil 3y ago
Oracle does care about open source, to the extent that they have been the top Linux kernel contributor several times. https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/oracle-is-the-1-contributor-to-the-linux-kernel 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/ 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 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."
- evan1107 3y ago
  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
  - chasil 3y ago
    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.
    - aidenn0 3y ago
- mighmi 3y ago
  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.
  - n6h6 3y ago
    What's up with the way you write the letter s? Is it a catch-all for apostrophes? I haven't seen anyone do that before, just curious.
    - Rechtsstaat 3y ago
      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.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        I honestly didn't expect the explanation of that to be as interesting as it is! I had no idea...
    - mighmi 3y ago
      Long story short: I decided to start using a separate laptop for work/tech stuff. Setting it up has been a bit of a pain: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmint/comments/14vzvex/on_hp_laptop_super_f1_acts_like_win_key_how_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmint/comments/14vzvex/on_hp_la... 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 If you really want to learn about ways to enter writing systems, this is a wild ride: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_comp...
- Hamcha 3y ago
  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).
  - klooney 3y ago
    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.
    - Hamcha 3y ago
      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.
- throwaway_62022 3y ago
  > 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.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Linux kernel is not entirety of Linux. 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.
    - whacko_quacko 3y ago
      You are "not even wrong", but that's all
      - chasil 3y ago
        There are more users of Bionic Linux libc than there are of GNU glibc. No, Linux is not always GNU.
        whacko_quacko 3y ago
        And that is a non sequitur
      - jameson71 3y ago
        Linux is the kernel. Let’s not ignore Mr. Stallman’s contributions to open source software.
  - 3y ago
- Sylamore 3y ago
  >"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.
- unmole 3y ago
  > 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. Also, you shouldn't anthropomorphize Oracle.
  - SauciestGNU 3y ago
    It's easier to anthropomorphize Oracle if you consider it as One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
    - beckingz 3y ago
      Yeah but the dude is like a lawnmower
  - stuaxo 3y ago
    We should always remember companies are just groups of humans who are accountable for their actions.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > Oracle does care about open source Counterpoints: * Oracle killed OpenSolaris. * 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.
- joe_a 3y ago
  Not sure about the “Oracle - the no 1 contributor” https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/ https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/ Unless lines of code defines the contribution level… amazing…
- Lutzb 3y ago
  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. Anyway, the discussion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32150138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32150138 is interesting.
whartung 3y ago
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. It could have been far, far worse.
- josephcsible 3y ago
  > Oracle has been a remarkably good steward of Java Well, other than ramming through modules and the --add-opens fiasco from Java 9.
  - musicale 3y ago
    And that stupid lawsuit.
  - vram22 3y ago
    What was the issue about modules?
    - josephcsible 3y ago
      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.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  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.
  - 3y ago
D13Fd 3y ago
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.
monkeywork 3y ago
OEL is basically the primary driver that caused RHEL to take this current path this is all just too rich.

geerlingguy 3y ago

"A broken clock is right twice a day," something like that.

chasil 3y ago

Oracle does care about open source, to the extent that they have been the top Linux kernel contributor several times. https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/oracle-is-the-1-contributor-to-the-linux-kernel 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/ 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 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."

evan1107 3y ago
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
- chasil 3y ago
  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.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
mighmi 3y ago
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.
- n6h6 3y ago
  What's up with the way you write the letter s? Is it a catch-all for apostrophes? I haven't seen anyone do that before, just curious.
  - Rechtsstaat 3y ago
    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.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      I honestly didn't expect the explanation of that to be as interesting as it is! I had no idea...
  - mighmi 3y ago
    Long story short: I decided to start using a separate laptop for work/tech stuff. Setting it up has been a bit of a pain: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmint/comments/14vzvex/on_hp_laptop_super_f1_acts_like_win_key_how_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmint/comments/14vzvex/on_hp_la... 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 If you really want to learn about ways to enter writing systems, this is a wild ride: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_comp...
Hamcha 3y ago
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).
- klooney 3y ago
  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.
  - Hamcha 3y ago
    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.
throwaway_62022 3y ago
> 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.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Linux kernel is not entirety of Linux. 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.
  - whacko_quacko 3y ago
    You are "not even wrong", but that's all
    - chasil 3y ago
      There are more users of Bionic Linux libc than there are of GNU glibc. No, Linux is not always GNU.
      - whacko_quacko 3y ago
        And that is a non sequitur
    - jameson71 3y ago
      Linux is the kernel. Let’s not ignore Mr. Stallman’s contributions to open source software.
- 3y ago
Sylamore 3y ago
>"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.
unmole 3y ago
> 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. Also, you shouldn't anthropomorphize Oracle.
- SauciestGNU 3y ago
  It's easier to anthropomorphize Oracle if you consider it as One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
  - beckingz 3y ago
    Yeah but the dude is like a lawnmower
- stuaxo 3y ago
  We should always remember companies are just groups of humans who are accountable for their actions.
sangnoir 3y ago
> Oracle does care about open source Counterpoints: * Oracle killed OpenSolaris. * 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.
joe_a 3y ago
Not sure about the “Oracle - the no 1 contributor” https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/ https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/ Unless lines of code defines the contribution level… amazing…
Lutzb 3y ago
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. Anyway, the discussion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32150138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32150138 is interesting.

whartung 3y ago

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. It could have been far, far worse.

josephcsible 3y ago
> Oracle has been a remarkably good steward of Java Well, other than ramming through modules and the --add-opens fiasco from Java 9.
- musicale 3y ago
  And that stupid lawsuit.
- vram22 3y ago
  What was the issue about modules?
  - josephcsible 3y ago
    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.
JohnFen 3y ago
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.
- 3y ago

D13Fd 3y ago

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.

monkeywork 3y ago

OEL is basically the primary driver that caused RHEL to take this current path this is all just too rich.