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.
But I felt this article was written in a sincere spirit to keep Linux open and multiparty. There are obviously many more reasons for such a sentiment than just the natural urge to undress and smoke up (I know, puzzles me too). However in these times of often direct aggression to anything I know and love I welcomed it a sight for sour eyes.
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.
From a practical standpoint, we believe Oracle Linux will remain as compatible as it has always been through release 9.2, but after that, there may be a greater chance for a compatibility issue to arise. If an incompatibility does affect a customer or ISV, Oracle will work to remediate the problem.
This is the part of the post I find most interesting. Looks like Oracle won’t be engaging in whatever workarounds Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux are using to continue operating as downstream distros of RHEL. Instead, if I’m reading this correctly it means Oracle Linux will essentially be forking from RHEL past 9.2. There were essentially three options before Oracle when Red Hat made their license change:
Pay Red Hat for RHEL licenses. Lol as if, Larry Ellison didn’t become a billionaire by spending money he didn’t need to.
Use whatever workarounds to remain a downstream distro and pay Red Hat nothing, while using their army of lawyers to fend off any ensuing lawsuits from Red Hat / IBM. It’s not like they couldn’t afford to fight the case after all.
Fork from Red Hat.
That they’ve chosen the third options is kind of fascinating to me, and to understand why you’d probably need to understand how enterprise database support works. The Oracle databases I see day to day are massive, and they drive practically all of a company’s core operations. Unanticipated downtime is fucking expensive, so these companies are willing to pay a lot for top-tier support (not like I think Oracle Support is actually good, mind you, but that’s a whole other topic). The DBAs running these databases don’t want to deal with any headaches whatsoever, so they’re only going to install Oracle on approved operating systems. They can’t afford to have Oracle say “nope, sorry, unsupported platform” during an outage.
For a couple decades now, the supported Linux platforms for Oracle Database have been RHEL, SLES and Oracle Linux. Obviously Oracle Linux will remain on that list, and I doubt SLES is going anywhere either (it tends to be popular in Europe), but does RHEL drop off the list in future? Does Oracle think they can actually convert RHEL installs to Oracle Linux installs at customer sites? Or does RHEL stay on the list but become the red-headed step-child? Either way, this feels like an attempt by Oracle to erode the value of Red Hat’s platform. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.
I also did not expect the fork. I thought they would slime their way forward and use Oracle’s army of lawyers against IBM.
But now I expect new RHEL releases to become unsupported in the next database LTS release, 23c. All the customers on RHEL will probably migrate to Oracle Linux on their next upgrade, even if Red Hat support is better you don’t want to be unsupported on critical systems because you’ll have no one to blame when the shit hits the fan.
I was actually kind of hoping for the second option, if only so that it would be Oracle footing the legal bill to establish a precedent. That Oracle didn’t choose this option may indicate that Red Hat’s coercive license wrapper (“if you exercise your open source rights to redistribute, we’ll close your account”) is actually an effective and legal end-run around open source licenses. I don’t want that to be the case.
Yeah the historical precedents were all Oracle giving Red Hat the finger and Red Hat going “sure, we won’t go after you” because… well… would you wanna get into a lawsuit war with Oracle? They look at the legal system as a revenue stream.
I totally wouldn’t/do not expect an Oracle fork. I expected they’d just continue on as always. That’s probably also bad news for Red Hat tbh.
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…
I’ll never use an Oracle product and IBM is a soulless corporation. Debian is a much better product anyway but they’re missing some of the really good enterprise features that Red Hat has. I hope at some point they have solutions for Satellite and IDM.
You know it’s bad when Oracle starts taking potshots. Fuck em’ both – I’m not about to forget about that API nonsense – but I’m just pleased to see blood in the water.
This is hilarious considering one of the main reasons IBM is clamping down on RHEL is because they are literally taking RHEL, changed the stickers to “Oracle” and calls it a day to sell their own propietary shit. Of course they are against RedHat closing down RHEL, they need it to compile Oracle Linux.
I don’t like what RedHat is doing (or IBM, however you want to see it) but cheering for Oracle on this particular issue is just wrong
If you’re using a software suite that requires Oracle Database, it and RHEL are safe options. It’s used where I work for that reason, but only relating to said software. This vendor only officially supports those 2 distros, and to a lesser extent Windows.
It would be corporate clients that are already all on Oracle for their careers. I’ve met guys that have built their entire career on Oracle and if you suggest any other software they’ll try to politically assassinate you. Some people just care about money not the work they do.
Me neither. And I always wondered why you wouldn’t just go directly to the source and go with RedHat for enterprise usecases. Perhaps cheaper support contracts?
We struggled with red hat because our product is usually in airgapped installations. We know how many we’ve sold, but we don’t know how many are still in use.
Say a customer buys one unit. Then 5 years later, they replace it. And 5 years on, they replace it again. On the books that’s 3 sold. We don’t know that two were retired, we don’t know these are all the same installation. So red hat wants us to pay 3 annual licences for this, and those licences don’t end until we can prove the installation was retired. The costs effectively snowball indefinitely.
We wanted to pay - it was the easiest route to certain federal qualifications. But we couldn’t come to an agreement on how to pay.
One must be really far from linux to choose oracle linux among hundreds of available distros
Not really a choice when the products they sell (their database/cloud solutions) are tied to it or RHEL. But yeah, I doubt there’s many who’d call it their favorite distro
Mostly their Oracle Database customers (which aren’t few), I suppose. There are many which will fire up a Oracle Linux vm on their servers to install Oracle database, mostly because its “easier” and Oracle gives some support for those.
Anyone who uses Oracle Cloud is either directly or indirectly using Oracle Linux. Oracle Cloud is ~2% of the cloud market, so it’s small compared to the big three (AWS ~32%, Azure ~23%, GCP 10% according to this report) but 2% of a very big market ($237 billion total estimated for 2023) is still a significant user base.
From my own work, most of the Oracle Cloud adoption I see appears to be driven by favourable prices for Exadata Cloud as compared to purchasing on-prem Exadata hardware. Oracle Linux is also baked into Exadata “Cloud-at-Customer”, which has essentially the same cloud control plane but the hardware and all data lives on-prem at the customer’s site. That seems fairly popular with customers who want Exadata performance but can’t allow their data to leave their premises for security reasons.
A lot of company behind the scence do, with Oracle DB… even there are RHEL, they opt to use OL because it’s free, and they only need to pay the DB License…
If we’re going about what’s technically permitted, then RedHat is also permitted to change licence, close it down and stop any new versions from being open or free. All their development goes into the upstream so I don’t even know what Oracle is trying to say here. Except “we want open access to RHEL, not just upstream sources like CentOS”.
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.
Cheering for Oracle is certainly an unexpected turn of events, but here we are. They are absolutely right that RedHatIBM’s motivations are simply to kill competition and obtain vendor lock-in by ending RHEL compatibility. RedHat is truly dead.
Cheering for Oracle is certainly an unexpected turn of events, but here we are.
Oracle is literally freeloading RHEL without giving anything back. If they were an active Fedora and CentOS contributor, I would have sympathy but they are not.
RedHat is truly dead.
Red Hat is (at the moment at least) still the biggest FOSS supporter around. Oracle’s behavior makes clear that they have absolutely no interest in picking up contributions in upstream FOSS community projects.
lol "competition". Oracle doesn't contribute 1/10th that Red Hat does to open source. This whole controversy is BECAUSE of Oracle copying Red Hat's homework with OEL. Now they are pissed because they can't have a free lunch anymore at Red Hat's expense.
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