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"Oracle’s move seems like a straightforward decision to ensure it is using the most permissive underlying IaC tool without having to worry about downstream lice

by jph 2y ago

"Oracle’s move seems like a straightforward decision to ensure it is using the most permissive underlying IaC tool without having to worry about downstream license complications, no more and no less." Oracle wins a big competitive talking point versus IBM, as well as crushing the value of IBM's acquisition of Hashicorp, and completely eliminating IBM's Terraform inroad into a large group of Oracle's enterprise customers.

pwarner 2y ago
I think Oracle Linux was a similar approach to let their customers use RedHat Linux without paying RedHat, now also IBM.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Oracle Linux has been a thing for decades. It's largely because a lot of Oracle DB products where performance mattered (eg. Exadata) needed some sort of a base OS that Oracle could manage and optimize as needed.
  - thelastgallon 2y ago
    > It's largely because a lot of Oracle DB products where performance mattered (eg. Exadata) needed some sort of a base OS that Oracle could manage and optimize as needed All that’s needed is update sysctl.conf to tune kernel parameters to the workload. Every Linux sysadmin knows how to do this. What kernel parameters need to be updated is heavily documented for any product.
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      Having these pretuned AND having a dedicated support team doing the tuning for you is the killer app for some buyers, as it allowed Admins to concentrate on other work and also minimize management overhead for the Infra org. Spending $500k/yr on compute+support SLA is cheaper than $200k/yr on compute and hiring 3 admins dedicated to that piece of compute. This is the model that every Enterprise Infra vendor pushes (eg. Oracle, AWS, MongoDB, Nvidia), and most mid- and upper-market purchasers are used to it.
      - twoodfin 2y ago
        MongoDB offers a preconfigured Linux to run on? Or did you just mean Atlas?
        alephnerd 2y ago
        I mean MongoDB has a professional services SKU to simplify onboarding and management.
      - thelastgallon 2y ago
        > Having these pretuned AND having a dedicated support team doing the tuning Dedicated support team costs a lot more than you think. I guess you never had to deal with Oracle support. If you get hold of someone, all they will do it point to the documentation. All software products have documentation on how to install the product. Oracle has a large suite of products, their databases, ERPs, etc. For kernel parameters, its just a file, which takes a second https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/12.2/cwlin/changing-kernel-parameter-values.html#GUID-FB0CC366-61C9-4AA2-9BE7-233EB6810A31 https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/1... In reality though, all Infra teams, have infrastructure to install OS (and manage the fleet), then post-install customize the OS to which team is requesting, usually done via puppet or ansible to manage the configuration. There will be standardized configuration for application, web, database (just to keep it simple). I would be shocked if Oracle support (or any other vendor) is given login access to make changes on servers owned by clients. At best, you open a case, you get an incompetent support person who'll send you documentation. Oracle support does not replace admins. Oracle support gives you access to bug fixes, updates, documentation. I believe you can download most Oracle software for free, but without the docs and updates, its worthless. Other vendors may use the opposite strategy, docs openly available but software downloads are paid/subscriptions. > Spending $500k/yr on compute+support SLA is cheaper than $200k/yr on compute and hiring 3 admins dedicated to that piece of compute. In reality though, there will always be admins, then a whole lot DevOps/Cloud Ops/Kubernetes/SRE/etc people added, smooth talking manager/director increasing the spend from what could be done on bare-metal under 20K to a 20 million dollar multi cloud strategy. Why have 3 admins report to you, when you can have an army of 200 people do the same work for 100x more cost? Success stories and promotions all around!
    - zaphar 2y ago
      Oracle has a long history of not documenting all of this stuff and instead suggesting you should hire one of their army of consultants to help tune the OS or Database for you.
      - mingus88 2y ago
        If we are talking about tuning for a specific workload, what’s wrong with that? If your in-house DBA doesn’t have the experience to perform the specific tuning required, then that’s what support contracts are for The documentation can’t cover every customer’s use case and configuration. That’s just enabling folk to blindly copy inappropriate sysctls they don’t understand like they are building gentoo kernels.
        zaphar 2y ago
        You don't need to cover every use case. You just need to document what stuff does and how it affects to various workloads. A good engineer can from that information infer what they need for their workload. But not documenting that a control exists so that you can be bill you for consulting puts you in my "will not use" category.
    - johannes1234321 2y ago
      > All that’s needed is update sysctl.conf to tune kernel parameters to the workload. Mind that they do quite some work on the kernel itself to optimize it for their workloads: 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... The availability of Oracle's uek kernel is a differentiator from standard RHEL.
  - growse 2y ago
    Didn't they buy one of these (Solaris)?
    - Kwpolska 2y ago
      Maintaining an entire separate OS (like Solaris) is hard. Maintaining a fork of a Linux distro is easy.
    - claudex 2y ago
      That was after the launch of Oracle Linux.
dralley 2y ago
I don't see how any of this could be true considering IBM is also heavily involved in OpenTofu (and did so first)
- EspadaV9 2y ago
  I was wondering, once IBM got Hashicorp, if they would reverse the license change for Terraform. Not been that long since the announcement, so still hoping they will.
  - pquki4 2y ago
    Has there ever been notable instances of company regretting and reversing license change of a major project?
    - webwielder2 2y ago
      Unity!
    - baobun 2y ago
      Lerna, if that's major enough for you.
    - toast0 2y ago
      Oracle ended OpenSolaris although forks continue. Nokia and friends ended OpenSymbian, no forks afaik.
    - pxc 2y ago
      We're talking about an acquisition, not the original company making the reversal. Red Hat used to routinely open-source acquisitions. Sun also did— that's how we got OpenOffice (and by way of it, LibreOffice). StarOffice was proprietary when Sun bought it.
  - cies 2y ago
    I believe Hashicorp's move wrt the license of TF was in order to close the IBM takeover deal.

by jph 2y ago

pwarner 2y ago

I think Oracle Linux was a similar approach to let their customers use RedHat Linux without paying RedHat, now also IBM.

alephnerd 2y ago
Oracle Linux has been a thing for decades. It's largely because a lot of Oracle DB products where performance mattered (eg. Exadata) needed some sort of a base OS that Oracle could manage and optimize as needed.
- thelastgallon 2y ago
  > It's largely because a lot of Oracle DB products where performance mattered (eg. Exadata) needed some sort of a base OS that Oracle could manage and optimize as needed All that’s needed is update sysctl.conf to tune kernel parameters to the workload. Every Linux sysadmin knows how to do this. What kernel parameters need to be updated is heavily documented for any product.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    Having these pretuned AND having a dedicated support team doing the tuning for you is the killer app for some buyers, as it allowed Admins to concentrate on other work and also minimize management overhead for the Infra org. Spending $500k/yr on compute+support SLA is cheaper than $200k/yr on compute and hiring 3 admins dedicated to that piece of compute. This is the model that every Enterprise Infra vendor pushes (eg. Oracle, AWS, MongoDB, Nvidia), and most mid- and upper-market purchasers are used to it.
    - twoodfin 2y ago
      MongoDB offers a preconfigured Linux to run on? Or did you just mean Atlas?
      - alephnerd 2y ago
        I mean MongoDB has a professional services SKU to simplify onboarding and management.
    - thelastgallon 2y ago
      > Having these pretuned AND having a dedicated support team doing the tuning Dedicated support team costs a lot more than you think. I guess you never had to deal with Oracle support. If you get hold of someone, all they will do it point to the documentation. All software products have documentation on how to install the product. Oracle has a large suite of products, their databases, ERPs, etc. For kernel parameters, its just a file, which takes a second https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/12.2/cwlin/changing-kernel-parameter-values.html#GUID-FB0CC366-61C9-4AA2-9BE7-233EB6810A31 https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/1... In reality though, all Infra teams, have infrastructure to install OS (and manage the fleet), then post-install customize the OS to which team is requesting, usually done via puppet or ansible to manage the configuration. There will be standardized configuration for application, web, database (just to keep it simple). I would be shocked if Oracle support (or any other vendor) is given login access to make changes on servers owned by clients. At best, you open a case, you get an incompetent support person who'll send you documentation. Oracle support does not replace admins. Oracle support gives you access to bug fixes, updates, documentation. I believe you can download most Oracle software for free, but without the docs and updates, its worthless. Other vendors may use the opposite strategy, docs openly available but software downloads are paid/subscriptions. > Spending $500k/yr on compute+support SLA is cheaper than $200k/yr on compute and hiring 3 admins dedicated to that piece of compute. In reality though, there will always be admins, then a whole lot DevOps/Cloud Ops/Kubernetes/SRE/etc people added, smooth talking manager/director increasing the spend from what could be done on bare-metal under 20K to a 20 million dollar multi cloud strategy. Why have 3 admins report to you, when you can have an army of 200 people do the same work for 100x more cost? Success stories and promotions all around!
  - zaphar 2y ago
    Oracle has a long history of not documenting all of this stuff and instead suggesting you should hire one of their army of consultants to help tune the OS or Database for you.
    - mingus88 2y ago
      If we are talking about tuning for a specific workload, what’s wrong with that? If your in-house DBA doesn’t have the experience to perform the specific tuning required, then that’s what support contracts are for The documentation can’t cover every customer’s use case and configuration. That’s just enabling folk to blindly copy inappropriate sysctls they don’t understand like they are building gentoo kernels.
      - zaphar 2y ago
        You don't need to cover every use case. You just need to document what stuff does and how it affects to various workloads. A good engineer can from that information infer what they need for their workload. But not documenting that a control exists so that you can be bill you for consulting puts you in my "will not use" category.
  - johannes1234321 2y ago
    > All that’s needed is update sysctl.conf to tune kernel parameters to the workload. Mind that they do quite some work on the kernel itself to optimize it for their workloads: 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... The availability of Oracle's uek kernel is a differentiator from standard RHEL.
- growse 2y ago
  Didn't they buy one of these (Solaris)?
  - Kwpolska 2y ago
    Maintaining an entire separate OS (like Solaris) is hard. Maintaining a fork of a Linux distro is easy.
  - claudex 2y ago
    That was after the launch of Oracle Linux.

dralley 2y ago

I don't see how any of this could be true considering IBM is also heavily involved in OpenTofu (and did so first)

EspadaV9 2y ago
I was wondering, once IBM got Hashicorp, if they would reverse the license change for Terraform. Not been that long since the announcement, so still hoping they will.
- pquki4 2y ago
  Has there ever been notable instances of company regretting and reversing license change of a major project?
  - webwielder2 2y ago
    Unity!
  - baobun 2y ago
    Lerna, if that's major enough for you.
  - toast0 2y ago
    Oracle ended OpenSolaris although forks continue. Nokia and friends ended OpenSymbian, no forks afaik.
  - pxc 2y ago
    We're talking about an acquisition, not the original company making the reversal. Red Hat used to routinely open-source acquisitions. Sun also did— that's how we got OpenOffice (and by way of it, LibreOffice). StarOffice was proprietary when Sun bought it.
- cies 2y ago
  I believe Hashicorp's move wrt the license of TF was in order to close the IBM takeover deal.