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(Disclaimer: I had a hand in a lot of this) That's not quite the intent. Look, here's the deal: I know we all like to think that corporations are evil and the

• jasonlingx 14y ago
  Still no good answer... why is Oracle doing this? I don't see how this story doesn't end with a whole bunch of people having to convert back to CentOS when someone at Oracle questions the value in offering this distribution for free.
  • SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    It's obvious why Oracle is doing this. It's the same reason Red Hat does Fedora. It doesn't cost anything and eventually, you might reach a size or a problem where you need support. If you do, and you are running the free version of a company's Linux, that is the company that you will inevitably turn to (with your cash) for support.
    • facorreia 14y ago
      Not to mention Red Hat is their competition in the Java space. Capturing people from Red Hat's ecosystem and moving them towards Oracle's is a pretty aggressive move. It's war on Red Hat. And also on Microsoft, which is using CentOS as a weapon against Red Hat on its Azure platform.
  • skittles 14y ago
    If you switch to Oracle Linux and if you have some major problem you can't fix, then the next logical step is to pay for support. It would be a simple step to take since you're already running the official version.
    • ajays 14y ago
      I'm not an Oracle hater (I just dislike them a little). But if this is true, then they have an economic incentive to _not_ issue free fixes in a timely manner. Or, (not to sound to tinfoil-hattish) to release _slightly_ broken things that don't impact an individual installation, but impact clusters. Again, I'm not saying that they _will_ do the above; just that there is economic incentive for them to bring users into paying for support, and as long as they give it away for free, no one will bite. There's an old wives saying (used in a different context), that says "why would a guy buy a cow, if he can get the milk for free?"
    • acdha 14y ago
      Particularly because this is a weak point for Red Hat: they've even orphaned paying customers in the past and there's currently no supported migration path for CentOS. If you're using CentOS or Scientific and decide you want support, there's significant value to being able to pay for support without being told to do a bare-metal reinstall of everything first.
  • mhurron 14y ago
    > why is Oracle doing this? Red Hat must have pissed them off or something. Maybe they realized how many people are leaving Solaris for RHEL.
  • sciurus 14y ago
    Because if you're running Oracle Linux for free, when you need support you're more likely to start paying Oracle than you would be if you were running CentOS or Scientific Linux.
  • jpalomaki 14y ago
    I could imagine Oracle's long term goal would be to replace Red Hat's role as The Linux Distribution for commercial stuff. One way to do this would be to start this way. Without giving their stuff for free, they would never gain significant share of the total market.
    • ChuckMcM 14y ago
      This. I've tried to analyze this a dozen ways and so far the only one that makes sense is that Oracle has decided to kill RedHat. They want a billion dollar OS business and RedHat has that, but they can't just buy RedHat because with Linux the guys just quit and set up service as 'BlueHat' and continue on their merry way and the customers follow them. So. The only way to kill RedHat is to take all of their customers. Since RedHat has a GPL'd product Oracle has just as much right to give it away as RedHat does. They try to convert 'free' customers to 'support' customers when a problem comes up. If they are successful, people migrate to their version of Linux, RedHat dies, Oracle gets the support business because they are not dependent on Linux support revenues to survive. "Poof" Oracle 'owns' a billion dollar OS business. Their investment in getting it is probably less than a 'normal' buyout price if RedHat was a commercial software company. Of course if they don't convert customers fast enough I'm sure Larry will grow tired of this ploy and flush it down the toilet. At which point people on Oracle Linux will be either sudden new RHEL customers or back to CentOS/SL.
      • nodata 14y ago
        You really need more upvotes :)
  • jasonlingx 14y ago
    I could see one good thing that could come out of this - Redhat offering their distribution for free.
  • swa14 14y ago
    Well, price dumping, I would say. Normally centos users would "grow into" payed support from RH. Now Oracle claims to give them that support without cost. Unbreakable Linux was never an attempt to have their own distribution, it was to undercut RH, and now they're found a new way to do that through Centos. It may cost Oracle money, but it costs RH more money, because, after all, they actually build a distribution. Ideally, kill/buy RH, phase out Unbreakable, and cram in proprietary Solaris. But for now just destabilizing the RH ecosystem has to do.
• nodata 14y ago
  > I know we all like to think that corporations are evil and the presence of corporate interests actually messes stuff up. But Oracle actually is evil. > But this really is one case where you want the oomph of bilion-dollar company making sure that you get your security updates in time. Don't be naive, Oracle wouldn't be doing this if they didn't see a substantial business advantage. > No one else is providing that. Oracle happens to be doing so, and we're making it available to you for free, so why shouldn't you benefit from that? Awww. Oracle is so altruistic! Oracle has proven time again that they can't be trusted, and giving Oracle more control can only be bad.
  • davidw 14y ago
    It's quite possible, that, being a huge company, they do a lot of bad crap (they are not high on my list), but there are some good people there trying to do good things.
    • andrewcooke 14y ago
      so when centos is dead and buried and oracle turns round and shafts us we should say "well, there were some good people there...."?
      • wdaher 14y ago
        Given that Red Hat still can't get some people to move off RHEL 3, I'm amused that you think this could actually kill CentOS :) And in the unlikely event that it were to happen, you could just switch to Scientific Linux, or whatever new RHEL clone would crop up in the wake of the news.
        • andrewcooke 14y ago
          or we could stick with the guys who have given us centos. i am not sure why your compassion is so selective. people who work for fucking oracle are misunderstood saints, while the poor sods that put centos together - who have never done anyone any harm - should be thrown to the wolves.
• justauser 14y ago
  Just an FYI but I'm fairly certain wdahher is Waseem Daher who is the cofounder of Ksplice. So if you're wanting to hear it directly from the "horse's mouth", this is probably a good place to ask some questions.
  • wdaher 14y ago
    Yes, that's me!
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• dkroy 14y ago
  This is a really smart move. I started typing a huge write up why, but there are too many reasons why this free product/paid support model are good for both Oracle and their future clients.
  • keithpeter 14y ago
    OK, just pop some bullet points here so we can all benefit from your perspective. I don't think anyone will criticise a rough draft.
• naner 14y ago
  It doesn't have anything to do with "corporations", people dislike/distrust Oracle specifically.
• raverbashing 14y ago
  I'd prefer to use RH company's oomph, instead of Oracle Using Oracle is a liability as the Google trial showed us.
• krschultz 14y ago
  I don't think corporations are evil. In fact, I bet most people on HN don't think that. We do want big companies behind the Linux ecosystem. There are already many out there (Red Hat, Canonical, among them) doing just that. So if I have a budget for paying for a Linux distro, where do I want my money to go? Red Hat, Oracle, or Canonical? In my mind I'm ranking them 1. Canonical 2. Red Hat 3. everyone else in the world 4. Oracle You need to fix that perception before Oracle Linux will go anywhere. Freatures won't do it. You could offer free support for a year and I wouldn't do it. At the end of the day, most of us know that the value out of a 'support' contract isn't really the support. It's knowing that the product will continue forward. So who do I want my budget to fund?
  • Produce 14y ago
    >I don't think corporations are evil. In fact, I bet most people on HN don't think that. I don't think that anything is evil per se, but I do think that corporations and modern businesses are defective by design. Why are they defective? Several reasons. A) They are frequently more populous than can be effectively managed (also see: Dunbar's number). B) They are unethical by design since money can be made by simply throwing money in a particular direction. This make no fucking sense whatsoever. Imagine if money didn't exist and we only had physical goods. It would be the equivalent of having 100 logs, putting them on a particular patch of ground then ending up with 200 logs a week later. This just makes no sense. C) The are unethical by design since the wage gap is huge and the scenario is essentially that many hundreds or thousands of people are working to make a tiny minority extremely rich. It ain't slavery, Bob, but it sure as fuck smells like it. C part deux) They are unethical by design because when a worker creates something, it is by default not his. Common sense dictates that what comes from your hands belongs to you. The rules of business are such that what comes from thousands of peoples' hands belongs to one person. If there was ever a scam...! D) The purpose of the business is to ensure it's own survival. A more enlightened approach would be a business which ensures the parent society's survival. This makes more sense because when an entire society flourishes, so do all the businesses contained in it. When a single business flourishes, other businesses and, by extension, parts of society will suffer for it. In other words, the world ain't zero sum and modern business practices do not appear to take this into account.
• ghjm 14y ago
  You are saying that Oracle's goal is to make sure that CentOS customers can access the resources of a billion dollar company in order to get security patches on time. If that were all that was going on, then Oracle would just provide funding and engineering support to CentOS. Since you aren't doing that, one of two things must be happening: 1. This is part of a long term strategy, which means it will somehow make a play for my wallet on some future date. 2. This is not part of a long term strategy, which means it is a low-level initiative. Most likely it will chug along until the responsible middle manager retires, transfers or gets bored with it. If by some happenstance it becomes successful enough to attract the attention of top management, then goto #1. Bottom line - Oracle is a business and wants my money. I know it, and you know it. Using free products from Oracle is like accepting a favor from Tony Soprano. Sooner or later, the bill comes due.
  • keithpeter 14y ago
    "We do want big companies behind the Linux ecosystem. There are already many out there (Red Hat, Canonical, among them) doing just that." Canonical isn't that big on a scale of Red Hat, and is rounding error on a scale of Oracle. They punch well above their financial weight and good luck to them
  • sigkill 14y ago
    I believe they're playing Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Right now, they're at the Embrace stage.
• jgeorge 14y ago
  wdaher, I don't question for a moment your intent and your altruism for this project, and please don't take my criticism of Oracle as anything personal. I agree with you that corporations are not inherently evil. However, I am of the opinion that Oracle is inherently evil, and it's their business practices, pricing practices, and licensing practices that are ruining their reputation in the industry. I form this opinion from personal experience dealing with Oracle over hardware, database, middleware, support, and operating system issues with my current employer. Oracle here is not well loved and the concept of converting CentOS instances to Oracle Linux is greeted with peals of laughter at the very suggestion. I wish you luck in your endeavors, but in your enthusiasm please also keep in mind that Oracle is not known as the most trustworthy company on the block and people are righly justified in being wary of Oracle's intent in providing a "free" product or service.
• bcantrill 14y ago
  Anyone decrying Oracle as "evil" is falling into a trap that I have warned about[1]: they are making the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison -- they are infusing Oracle with humanity that it does not in fact have. Oracle is, as another commenter put it, a corporate sociopath. The inability to empathize is fine for a monopolist (and indeed, it's a terrific asset -- and after five months of working there, I concluded that it's the only thing that I think Oracle has any real talent for), but it's terrible for a technology company. In particular, the inability for Oracle to see anyone other than themselves leads to decisions that don't just erode trust, they destroy it beyond all repair. What you are seeing here are the costs of Oracle's decisions: it's what Oracle did to Hudson, to MySQL, to Java and to OpenSolaris. If you honestly don't understand that -- if you truly believe in your heart that the dismissal of Oracle is somehow merely Occupy-esque anti-corporate sentiment -- then you yourself probably have an inability to empathize that should bode very well for your future career at Oracle. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=33m0s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=33m0s
  • cmkrnl 14y ago
    The fate of OpenSolaris is quite sad. Do you think SmartOS and similar efforts will significantly diverge from Solaris in the future? This thing with Oracle Linux - I always felt that Red Hat should've made RHEL (+ Desktop) freely available (including updates) since the beginning.
    • bcantrill 14y ago
      It depends on what you mean by "significantly diverge." If you mean "innovate", then yes -- absolutely. We already have tons of evidence of differentiated innovation in illumos[1][2][3] -- none of which can be brought back into Solaris.[4] [1] http://blog.delphix.com/matt/2012/07/11/performance-of-zfs-destroy/ http://blog.delphix.com/matt/2012/07/11/performance-of-zfs-d... [2] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2012/06/07/dtrace-in-the-zone/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2012/06/07/dtrace-in-the-zone/ [3] http://dtrace.org/blogs/rm/2012/07/16/per-thread-caching-in-libumem/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/rm/2012/07/16/per-thread-caching-in-... [4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=43m55s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=43m55s