this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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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
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.
I am happy I don't have anything to do with oracle...
Believe me, there are certainly days when I wish I didn't have anything to do with Oracle. 🙃
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
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?
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?
Rocky for now, but I can’t say that’s set in stone
Rocky still walkaround using UBI source, and it's open, so in the end it's 99.99% compatible with RHEL.
Just fuck CIQ with their contract...
My company was starting to use OEL extensively over the past few months.
Pathetic wretches who couldn't escape Oracle's clutches, mostly.
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.