Oracle responds to Red Hat
Oracle weighing in on anything open source related is peak hypocrisy. Fuck Oracle. They’re not our friends.
Yeah seriously. It’s in their best interests to continue to ride on top of Redhat’s work. Do not believe for a second that if they were in Redhat’s position, they wouldn’t do the exact same thing.
As much as I dislike Oracle, they’ve been pretty good stewards of the Java open source project, and haven’t had any issues with anyone else rebadging the JDK, whether it be Zulu, BellSoft, Amazon, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, etc.
If anything, I’d like to see them put their money where their mouth is and hire Linux devs to continue Oracle Linux in an open manner.
Fuck oracle. They can do whatever you think it’s good about anything, but their licensing for commercial entities is horrendous and predatory.
So, once again, fuck oracle.
they’ve been pretty good stewards of the Java open source project
I am pretty sure Google (the company itself) would say otherwise.
They’ve also been pretty horrible stewards of VirtualBox.
Oracle is not friends with open source. To be honest, I trust RedHat over Oracle and that’s saying something.
Anybody that thinks Oracle has been good stewards of the open source community, is completely whacked. They have not. I’ll trust RH over Oracle as well.
Oh wow, I had blocked out the virtual box guest additions debacle/shake-down from my memory. It almost felt like entrapment, the way they went about it.
I’m out of the loop here, what happened?
VirtualBox is free and open source, the windows guest additions piece is not. However, they’re both available for free download from the same site and they do not make any distinction between those two (at least at the time, haven’t looked). They were waiting for companies to download the guest additions piece and going after them to shake down licensing fees. While I don’t recall/know exactly, it seemed like they were almost exclusively going after companies they already had commercial relationships with to add more licensing fees to existing contracts. So yes, from my perspective they were shaking down customers after trying to entrap them with ambiguous free downloads. They had the legal right to do so, but it felt in bad faith.
If anything, I’d like to see them put their money where their mouth is and hire Linux devs to continue Oracle Linux in an open manner.
Oracle Linux is already open: https://yum.oracle.com/. ISOs and full sources are freely downloadable, you don’t even need to create an account, and the Oracle Linux license explicitly states that you retain all your open source rights to any open source software distributed as part of Oracle Linux. I suppose it would be possible for Oracle to change their license to make it more akin to Red Hat’s and thus make Oracle Linux less free, but there’s been no sign of Oracle looking to do that.
Oracle also definitely has lots of Linux devs. They even throw some shade at IBM in the post:
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.
They need those Linux devs because all of Oracle Cloud and Oracle Exadata are built on Oracle Linux, and Oracle tests their main cash cow Oracle Database exclusively on Oracle Linux. I think that last point is actually the reason that Oracle Linux even exists. I don’t think Oracle cares too much about owning the OS layer, they want to be able to support their Database product on an OS that the majority of their customers are using without having to pay a tax to the OS vendor.
I also work on a product that has to interoperate with RHEL, and I also want my company to be able to test our product without having to pay a tax to Red Hat. I’m quite happy to see this blog post from Oracle because it shows that our aims are aligned and it means we’ve got an 800 lb. gorilla on our side of the line. Entirely possible Oracle could turn around and do the same things, but I’ve got no compunctions about cheering them on while our aims coincide.
You can on CentOS Stream… it’s the Red Hat upstream, but it is same as RHEL to be a testing ground…
Oracle is shit because they use Red Hat works, providing contract on top of it… and only add UEK as … “better option” …
They (oracle) do contribute some on mainline kernel, but by making RHEL copy paste and only add UEK and their product… ugh… I don’t know.
Oracle is shit because they use Red Hat works, providing contract on top of it… and only add UEK as … “better option” …
That’s something they were allowed to do. It’s something everyone was allowed to do. FOSS means free and open source for everyone, even people and organizations you don’t like. Otherwise it’s not really free (as in freedom), now is it?
Also, the “contract on top of it” is this license, which is a pretty short read. In my view it’s a very inoffensive license compared to Red Hat’s coercive license.
Also also, they’re forking Oracle Linux from RHEL as of 9.3, so they’re won’t be “taking” from Red Hat in future anyhow.
They (oracle) do contribute some on mainline kernel, but by making RHEL copy paste and only add UEK and their product… ugh… I don’t know.
It drives me nuts when I see people imply that Oracle was somehow “stealing” from Red Hat by creating a downstream distro. It’s not theft when the thing being taken was free and open source! So Oracle copy-pasted RHEL, made some changes and redistributed it. So what? That’s something everyone was allowed to do, as long as they didn’t violate the open source license while doing it. Oracle isn’t violating the open source licenses, the sources are freely available, so why should I fault them for doing what they did?
I think you’re also overlooking how much Oracle Linux actually benefited Red Hat themselves. By making Oracle Linux a downstream distro and testing all the Oracle software on it, I’d argue that Oracle actually made RHEL more valuable by increasing the number of enterprise workloads RHEL could support. Yes, a customer could theoretically get support from Oracle instead of Red Hat, but hardly anyone actually did that. I see real-world Oracle Database installs every day and the majority of them are on Red Hat Enterprise Linux proper. Very few are on a downstream. Every one of those RHEL installs is a paying Red Hat customer.
Oracle didn’t do all that out of the goodness of their hearts of course, they did it because their customers wanted to standardize on one OS and Oracle wanted to sell them database (and other) software. They did it for profit, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Both Oracle and Red Hat profited from that arrangement. Every enterprise Linux user indirectly benefited from the arrangement too, because it meant there was a less fragmented OS ecosystem to build on! But now Red Hat wants to alter the deal, Vader-style, Oracle is forking Oracle Linux, and you know who loses the most in all of this? All of those users who previously enjoyed the benefit of a less fragmented enterprise OS landscape, myself among them. As far I’m concerned, the blame for that lies squarely at Red Hat’s feet.
If they are so keen on GPL, why dont they re license ZFS from its current GPL clashing license that stops it from getting Integrated into Linux kernel source code…
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.
🤨
While oracle has definitely always been… problematic, it is refreshing to see something actually written by a real, rational person. It may just be corporate fodder, but it’s good for people in this case, something very rare - just like SUSE’s not-so-subtle PR statements.
Screw RH.
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.
Learn to never trust a corporation, no matter how “good” they are. Corporations exist for profit only, that is the only reason why they exist and function.
Even ORACLE is calling out Red Hat.
Who’s next, Apple?
Currently testing Debian in a VM, I have lots of files so I need to set everything straight before I switch.
I suppose Apple uses Linux in some of their servers, so maybe. But their desktop product is Darwin so I don’t think that’s getting any votes
Their desktop product is a stolen BSD.
Indeed, but with that kind of licensing there’s nothing stopping them. We already found limitations of GPL with RedHat, I think all of these licenses need an overhaul
Note that they still share code for much of Darwin, even where the license does not require it: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions
True, but from what I hear, the dumps don’t really help much. Better than nothing, I suppose
If they wanted their code to be sharealike, the developers could have chosen a different license. Apple is contributing more than is required so don’t complain?
The point is Apple doesn’t actually want to help the community - they might be hoping that someone goes through their dumps and finds a vulnerability and reports it to them. Free community sourced labour.
If they really wanted to help, MacOS should have been GPLv3. But we know that’s not how Apple functions.
