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

[sophisticles]

"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."

What a steaming pile of horse feathers.

First they say that will continue to base their distribution on Red Hat and then they say this.

They can't have it both ways, either they will continue basing their distro on Red Hat or they will create their own distro without worrying about binary compatibility with Red Hat/

They do have the resources, and they already have a distro, just continue on your own, same thing with the Rocky and the Alma people.

This is why I side with Red Hat on this one, and see Oracle, Rocky, and Alma as thieving, conniving, leeches that just want to profit from Red Hat's work.

These three already have viable distributions, the ones they currently make and should have no problem continuing to offer then to the public.

But that's not what these people want. What these people want is to be able to do is market their distro's as "Red Hat compatible" but at a lower cost.

And there in lies the rub. If Oracle, Rocky and Alma took the position that "we think Red Hat is the best distro available and we want to make it available to everyone, free of charge", it would still be a bit of a dick move, but at least they could hide behind a "for the good of humanity" claim.

But these guys want to take Red Hat's product, and provide the same services at a cheaper price, and that's what makes them a bunch of douches.

[chromer]

Redhat decisions are really shi*t and challenging people , damn you redhat.

[sophisticles]

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:

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.

The GPL is one of the dumbest things ever conceived.

I have a background in CS and have written a lot of code in my life.

Consider a situation like this, you're coding a new DE and there is one small part that you are having problems with. You decide to take a look at the KDE code base, and see a 4 line snippet of code that you realize would solve your issues nicely. You implement those 4 lines of code into your DE, which contains 750 thousand lines of code. So because you incorporated those 4 lines of code, that means that everything else you wrote is now also open source to be shared with the world?

What a bunch of nonsense.

[qarium]

What a steaming pile of horse feathers.
First they say that will continue to base their distribution on Red Hat and then they say this.
They can't have it both ways, either they will continue basing their distro on Red Hat or they will create their own distro without worrying about binary compatibility with Red Hat/
They do have the resources, and they already have a distro, just continue on your own, same thing with the Rocky and the Alma people.
This is why I side with Red Hat on this one, and see Oracle, Rocky, and Alma as thieving, conniving, leeches that just want to profit from Red Hat's work.
These three already have viable distributions, the ones they currently make and should have no problem continuing to offer then to the public.
But that's not what these people want. What these people want is to be able to do is market their distro's as "Red Hat compatible" but at a lower cost.
And there in lies the rub. If Oracle, Rocky and Alma took the position that "we think Red Hat is the best distro available and we cant to make it available to everyone, free of charge", it would still be a bit of a dick move, but at least they could hide behind a "for the good of humanity" claim.
But these guys want to take Red Hat's product, and provide the same services at a cheaper price, and that's what makes them a bunch of douches.

Red Hat did not invented it they did steal the code from the FLOSS/FOSS community and the GNU project...

i was long time on Debian then i thought redhat world and RPM based distros are not so bad after all and i switched to Fedora

but stuff like this of course next time i install my system new i will install Debian again to avoid corporate insanity.

of course this is not what IBM/redhat wants they want to sell you their product but its not sane to do so.

its more sane to use Debian and only use freelancer and free contractors to get the support you need.

[ssokolow]

Consider a situation like this, you're coding a new DE and there is one small part that you are having problems with. You decide to take a look at the KDE code base, and see a 4 line snippet of code that you realize would solve your issues nicely. You implement those 4 lines of code into your DE, which contains 750 thousand lines of code. So because you incorporated those 4 lines of code, that means that everything else you wrote is now also open source to be shared with the world?

As opposed to the developer not letting you see the source at all?

It's their code and their copyright in an All Rights Reserved world. You're not entitled to see it and they can set whatever terms they want for allowing you to do so.

As a hobby programmer trying to reverse-engineer how Windows 3.1 utilities did things like monkey-patching Program Manager to have custom program group icons, I understand that well. At least with the GPL, you can clean-room reverse-engineer it without needing to stare at disassembly listings or something else equally arcane. (i.e. Someone else reads the code, writes a description of the salient points in a high-level, abstract form, and then you work from that reference document to produce something not subject to the GPL.)

[omer666]

Red Hat did not invented it they did steal the code from the FLOSS/FOSS community and the GNU project...

i was long time on Debian then i thought redhat world and RPM based distros are not so bad after all and i switched to Fedora

but stuff like this of course next time i install my system new i will install Debian again to avoid corporate insanity.

of course this is not what IBM/redhat wants they want to sell you their product but its not sane to do so.

its more sane to use Debian and only use freelancer and free contractors to get the support you need.

Keep in mind that lots of open source projects are developed upstream by Red Hat developers, they are one of the biggest contributors to the Linux ecosystem. Other big contributors include AMD, Intel, and big corps like Microsoft or Google, and the rest of the open source community, GNU, Debian, and so on.

The point is not to say we owe Red Hat, but conceptually open source licencing means they are not stealing anything.

[dragon321]

That IBM ad in Oracle Linux screenshot is pretty ironic. It's also ironic that Oracle now talks about importance of open source like Java or OpenSolaris never existed.

But yeah, can't really blame them for trying to make some fame on unpopular Red Hat/IBM decision. This is how marketing works. When Microsoft switched to Chromium they also criticized Firefox for developing their own engine instead of using engine that everybody does.

[abufrejoval]

The sad truth is that enterprise Linux is dying, both because its value proposition is becoming largely irrelevant and because the clouds come with operating systems and orchestrators included.

RHEL was built on turning Linux into something that could compete and eventually eliminate Unix. It also pushed Windows server into a much smaller niche than it would have enjoyed if Linux had not happened.

It did so by building a platform that was not just operationally stable, but also stable in terms of interfaces and hardware support, much like Unix or z/OS.

It weathered the hypervisor wars relatively well thanks to a good buy of Qumranet, even managed to kick out Citrix and Xen from "their" food chain. But it fumbled already on system containers, refused OpenVZ, daddled with CXL, tried to push their proprietary OpenShift PaaS and then tried to attack Docker with Podman.

It didn't understand that you need system and application containers, preferably nested and perhaps a sprinkling of VM here and there, but all under a single management pane that really works well. They bought VDO, Gluster, Ansible, but never managed to turn OVH/oVirt and their K8 fork OpenShift into something that worked really well and in an integrated manner.

But you can get all that from the clouds and it's part of the platform, nothing you need to pay extra for. The only price is a bit of vendor lock-in, and that never hurt anyone, right?

But that doesn't matter: with the choice of paying taxes to Redhat, VMware and perhaps Terraform and Oracle DBs, or going into turnkey cloud, very few companies still even consider adding a Nutanix, VMware, Terraform or Redhat stack in the middle, as thin and cheap as that might eventually become with little more than an API translator. They'll just choose one cloud and be stuck to it.

The Redhat value proposition is dying and I guess they realized that. IBM is the world leader in extracting the maximum value off a dwindling platform, still making money of a mainframe officially declared dead at the start of my career more than 40 years ago.

It's kind of funny, because effectively with their custom silicon the cloud giants are building new mainframes. But this time the commodity PC based servers are losing, because the software taxes and maintenance overheads are simply too high for on-premise or "personal" IT.

But with this decision, Redhat has vastly accellerated the death of the ecosystem it helped to create and the chuckling winners are the clouds: they couldn't have done it better themselves!

Everyone not paying Redhat had good or bad reasons for doing so.

But while very few will now get Redhat subscriptions, many more developers and admins will scratch Redhat Enterprise Linux know-how as an asset from their list and concentrate on clouds with a bit of Ubuntu.

The short term money IBM might get bears no relationship to the value they destroyed in the minds and skillsets of the much broader Enterprise Linux community.

And what does Redhat have to sell, when RHEL is gone?

By then whoever made this decision will probably have retired and cashed in all stock options.

I just feel sad for any of the more recent hires...

[logical]

The GPL is one of the dumbest things ever conceived.

I have a background in CS and have written a lot of code in my life.

Consider a situation like this, you're coding a new DE and there is one small part that you are having problems with. You decide to take a look at the KDE code base, and see a 4 line snippet of code that you realize would solve your issues nicely. You implement those 4 lines of code into your DE, which contains 750 thousand lines of code. So because you incorporated those 4 lines of code, that means that everything else you wrote is now also open source to be shared with the world?

What a bunch of nonsense.

LOL What is nonsense is your comment. If you wish to use someone else's code you have to follow their license terms. If you don't like the terms then don't use the code. Simple. You want others to follow *your* license terms for *your* code before they use it, don't you? People make different license terms for all sorts of reasons. They are personal choices.

[abufrejoval]

Ah, yes, "come and pull from us" is a ballsy statement from the soft spoken Wim, who Larry has enjoyed needling the competition for a long time.

And while I believe, he may not be entirely wrong when he believes UEK can be something good, I've only noticed that kicking UEK out from both the management engine and the node servers on Oracles variant of oVirt, immediately got rid of all the problems I had (lack of VDO support among them. And I used that only because Sun had relentlessly bragged on how good their dedup/compression was).

Yes HCI is no longer mentioned by either Redhat or Oracle for oVirt 4.4/5, but it's really the only variant that still makes any sense at the outer edges, which is where I am using it today.

Most likely it will be Proxmox tomorrow and after that options have run out.