Oracle Intends To Keep Trying To Make Oracle Linux Compatible With RHEL

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Oracle Intends To Keep Trying To Make Oracle Linux Compatible With RHEL

Following the stunning decision last month by IBM that they would begin limiting access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources, AlmaLinux quickly came out working on a path forward and Rocky Linux also shared some ideas how they may continue providing a RHEL-compatible Linux distribution. We've been waiting for Oracle to comment on their plans for the RHEL-compatible Oracle Linux distribution and today they finally issued a statement...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Oracle-Linux-Keep-RHEL-Compat

[igxqrrl]

My brain is exploding. First I find myself rooting for Facebook, with Threads challenging Twitter. Now here I am actually rooting for Oracle.

Are we suddenly living in upside-down world?

[cjcox]

Words. Typical Oracle bravado. While it's certainly possible that Oracle could ramp up and support their own distribution as a fork, IMHO, it's highly unlikely short term. If they want to back this up, they need to prepare to fork today and it will take a bit to get everything ready. With that said, while Oracle is a "bad boy" and belongs to that club, Red Hat is also a member now.

[andyprough]

Larry Ellison has always had a strong troll game.

Trolling RedHat and IBM doesn't suddenly transform you into a freedom-friendly mega-corp though Oracle.

[deusexmachina]

Oracle cares so much which is why they force open source devs to waste massive amounts of times working around ZFS licenses.

[darkbasic]

LOL who would have imagined Oracle teaching FOSS lessons to Red Hat a couple of years ago?

[anarki2]

Of course they do, it's their only selling point lol.

[lejeczek]

Right, temper tantrums continue. Now one corporation is unhappy that they suddenly are not allowed stay on free ride at the back of another corporation.
Much like children who cried when 'systemd' first came to the scene screaming.. disaster!! help! (& today many if not all shall agree - systemd? fantastic).
Centos has been great and is even better since it's "streaming" - go and get, nothing & nobody should stop you. Want to be 100% binary compatible - go get RHEL subscription - those I believe are still free of charge for self-support/devel, have been for a while.

[bug77]

Bombastic speech aside, the only real info in there is that Oracle has no idea what they will do past 9.2.

[ClosedSource]

I'll get my head bitten off for this but do try to be open minded while reading my post. I don't condone making things difficult for others especially in today's fragile world. No one has a dime today that didn't come as a result of an unfair advantage. the GPL basically intends to prevent a situation where I may take someone's code, modify it, and distribute it, without giving back my changes along with my distributions. It's still someone's code. I only acquired a license. I can't steal. GPL makes it a strong point that I cannot steal. When Red Hat tells its clients they can have the code as long as they don't redistribute don't constitute anything illegal nor does it pause any legal issues on its clients. They are only trying to prevent someone leeching off their code changes. Otherwise you would simply download upstream tarballs and compile them. The large picture here is that the GPL is indeed designed to protect folks like Red Hat but the approach is somewhat shortsighted. I can't say I blame Red Hat.

Then when you look at what Oracle says:

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.

Trolling IBM isn't the point here. They are trying to be opportunistic. There is no way to guarantee they won't eventually feel company loyalty should result in weeding out the leeches.
Having said that, Red Hat's best approach would be to exempt RHEL clones that submit an xyx amount of daily QA feedback from the new policy.

If I were to post my personal opinion, I would say that the GPL needs to die and Red Hat should not be making billions over software they only patched and polished. Sadly the spirit of the the GPL is what protects people like Red Hat. It's a very short sighted system that has no clear indication of who is a leech and who isn't.