Oracle: Keep Linux Open and Free—We Can’t Afford Not To
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https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/blog/keep-linux-open-and-free-2023-07-10/
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.
Of course they would! Corporations do what's in their best interests. Corporations gonna corporate.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah we had to deal with that too, but are definitely not even using VirtualBox for anything. Seems like they gave up easy in our case.
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.
The problem that I want to phrase here is, they redistribute the code, but when the problem arise, they open bug ticket in RH Bugzilla, then... asking red hat to fix it... which is.. unacceptable... and unprofessional, when they have billion dollars of contract on top of OL... So it's stealing in my term.
using red hat powerful brand, selling the code, and if it break, only open ticket, never invest in engineer to fix it... :/ If it's not stealing, I don't know what it is...
I know it's GPL and Open Source, and everyone can take it. And Red Hat Works still, open source in CentOS Stream repo.. so just fork it, and rebuild it... done... why they wine that Red Hat put code only for customer who pay for it... In the new contract, they only stop supporting customer, if Red Hat deems the code redistribution threaten red hat source of income.. so... I don't know..
GPL is about freedoom to write, contribute, inspect, and fix your own code, but not providing big chunk of code for free, and provide free support service...
That's what people always miss about... they want Red Hat guarantee of service and SLA, but don't want to spend a penny... small business, okay.. but CIQ and OL have billion dollar of contract, and never contribute anything upstream...
Alma/CloudLinux at least employ full time engineer in Fedora Project as part of join Red Hat and Alma Stewardship, but CIQ/Rocky, and OL isn't...
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.
Why do you think it would? Oracle rebranding RHEL and selling it as their own distro in direct competition with Red Hat is no doubt the biggest reason they made this change in the first place
They could just charge for-profit companies instead.
There would be ways to get around that, but then again, there are ways to get around the current implementation too
The problem is, they can't charge much. CIQ/Rocky, have very very cheap contract, and even you charge the vendor, it means all burden are in red hat, and any feature that CIQ/Rocky asked should be fullfilled, and it's not... align with red hat goals in the end...
Same as Alma/CloudLinux
They could just charge for-profit companies instead.
How? The whole point of the GPL is that they can't.
I had to read that again as I thought it was someone telling that to Oracle, which would make WAY more sense.
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
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
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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.
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
What I don't understand is: who is using oracle linux? Never heard of a single person or company using it?
One must be really far from linux to choose oracle linux among hundreds of available distros
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.
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.
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..
Free estate
What I don't understand is: who is using oracle linux? Never heard of a single person or company using it?
One must be really far from linux to choose oracle linux among hundreds of available distros
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
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?
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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.
Ah ic, thanks for sharing your experience! So which RHEL derivative did you end up going with?
Oracle doing what they're doing is literally explicitly and intentionally permitted under the licensing of the Linux kernel.
It's not abusing anything. It's the purpose of the 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".
No they aren't. Not unless they remove all the GPL code from their software.
It's the entire purpose of the GPL. You can never own derivative 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.
🤨
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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...
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 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.
Frankly as a layman I don't see any other reason than Oracle DB support to not just use good old Debian and forget about this licencing bullshit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Sure, corporations gonna corporate, capitalism sucks...
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.
@gobbling871 Who would've thought we would, at some point, root for Oracle? (Especially over RH). Anyway, this is just complete and absolute hypocrisy. Fuck Oracle. They've already shown their true colors many times, do they even remember Oracle v. Google?
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.