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Oracle Red Hat Software Open Source Linux

Oracle Takes On Red Hat In Linux Code Fight (zdnet.com) 129

Posted by BeauHD from the stay-tuned-folks dept.
Steven Vaughan-Nichols writes via ZDNet: I'd been waiting for Oracle to throw its hat into the ring for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Linux source-code fight. I knew it was only a matter of time. On July 10, Oracle's Edward Screven, chief corporate architect, and Wim Coekaerts, head of Oracle Linux development, declared: "IBM's actions are not in your best interest. By killing CentOS as a RHEL alternative and attacking AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, IBM is eliminating one way your customers save money and make a larger share of their wallet available to you."

In fact, Oracle now presents itself as an open-source Linux champion: "Oracle has always made Oracle Linux binaries and source freely available to all. We do not have subscription agreements that interfere with a subscriber's rights to redistribute Oracle Linux. On the other hand, IBM subscription agreements specify that you're in breach if you use those subscription services to exercise your GPLv2 rights." As of June 21, IBM no longer publicly releases RHEL source code -- in short, the gloves are off, and the fight's on. But this is also just the latest move in a fight that's older than many of you. [...]

Mike McGrath, Red Hat's vice president of core platforms, explained why Red Hat would no longer be releasing RHEL's code, but only CentOS Stream's code, because "thousands of [Red Hat] people spend their time writing code to enable new features, fixing bugs, integrating different packages and then supporting that work for a long time ... We have to pay the people to do that work." That sentiment is certainly true. But I also feel that Oracle takes the worst possible spin, with Screven and Coekaerts commenting: "IBM doesn't want to continue publicly releasing RHEL source code because it has to pay its engineers? That seems odd, given that Red Hat as a successful independent open source company chose to publicly release RHEL source and pay its engineers for many years before IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019 for $34 billion."

So, what will Oracle do now? For starters, Oracle Linux will continue to be RHEL-compatible through RHEL 9.2. After that release -- and without access to the published RHEL source code -- there are no guarantees. But Screven and Coekaerts suggest that "if an incompatibility does affect a customer or ISV, Oracle will work to remediate the problem." As for Oracle Linux's code: "Oracle is committed to Linux freedom. Oracle makes the following promise: as long as Oracle distributes Linux, Oracle will make the binaries and source code for that distribution publicly and freely available. Furthermore, Oracle welcomes downstream distributions of every kind, community, and commercial. We are happy to work with distributors to ease that process, work together on the content of Oracle Linux, and ensure Oracle software products are certified on your distribution."
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Oracle Takes On Red Hat In Linux Code Fight More

Oracle Takes On Red Hat In Linux Code Fight

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  • Oracle? (Score:5, Funny)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @10:05PM (#63678719)
    Funny!

    • Re:Oracle? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Brain-Fu ( 1274756 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @11:18PM (#63678829) Homepage Journal

      Dear Oracle: We have not forgotten your misdeeds. You have a very long way to go before we accept you as a champion of FOSS.

      Dear Red Hat: You have betrayed the FOSS community. Your rationalizations are vapid and specious. If you do not mend your ways, the community will abandon you. You have been warned.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by narcc ( 412956 )

        There was a time when there was a real chance that someone important from either organization would see your post. I suspect that those days are long-gone.

        That's not to say you're wrong. Oracle is no friend to FOSS and this isn't exactly Red Hat's first betrayal.

        If you haven't already, maybe it's time to move to Debian-based distros. I like Mint on the desktop and Ubuntu on the server.

      • Dear Brain-Fu: Sorry can you repeat that? I couldn't hear you over the sound of a truck dumping another share of the $50bn in revenue we made last year off at our office.

        The reality is you haven't forgiven them, but as far as Oracle is concerned they don't need you specifically as a customer. Most of the corporate world doesn't seem to give a shit about their misdeeds. If they did they wouldn't be on the Fortune 500 list.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Dear Oracle: We have not forgotten your misdeeds. You have a very long way to go before we accept you as a champion of FOSS.

        I would go so far that the current "we" will never do that and a lot of people need to retire before that ever becomes an option.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        The Community are not Red Hat's customers, corporations are. Eventually their behavior might hurt them, but I wouldn't hold your breath.

      • Re:Oracle? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by supremebob ( 574732 ) <(moc.seiticoeg) (ta) (yknujemeht)> on Wednesday July 12, 2023 @08:50AM (#63679511) Journal

        Looking back, we can "thank" Oracle for the creation of MariaDB and LibreOffice thanks to the mismanagement of the MySQL and Openoffice open source projects after they took ownership of them from Sun.

        Maybe SuSE's announcement of a forked version of RHEL will lead to similar progress thanks to IBM's similar mismanagement of CentOS?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by u19925 ( 613350 )

          "mismanagement of the MySQL"

          What mismanagement? MariaDB was announced before Oracle acquired Sun. It was created as soon as Oracle announced that it was buying Sun.

    • Old proverb...probably applicable here and in some military situations: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sconeu ( 64226 )

        Nope. The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. He may be my temporary ally, but he is not necessarily my friend.

  • Wait, Oracle?? (Score:3)

    by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @10:15PM (#63678745) Journal

    You're kidding? Oracle?

    Um, spell that please?

    o-r-a-c-l-e? This is, like Oracle the database company?

    Really?

    What's the catch?

    But seriously, I've read elsewhere that some enterprises are migrating to Debian, as it's just as solid and is in no (current) danger of going proprietary.

    • Re:Wait, Oracle?? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by linzeal ( 197905 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @10:44PM (#63678781) Journal

      If Debian goes proprietary that would be a sign of the end times.

      • If Debian goes proprietary that would be a sign of the end times.

        If Greed decided to bend over Debian and fork it right in the FOSS-hole, the end result would likely be...how we got Debian.

        Don't think it would mean "end times", since you're describing the very motivation for non-proprietary solutions.

      • Not really. Debian itself is a fork of SLS which was a fundamental distro others were based on at the time. The systemd saga culminating in the existence of Devuan also shows that there's no decision Debian can make that can't be resolved through the normal open source process.

        What sets Debian apart from Red Hat is that they aren't selling expensive things to big-iron customers. The two are not comparable, and Debian deciding tomorrow to not make source available unless someone pays will just mean Devtoo wi

      • They are bundling proprietary firmware by default now, just sayin'...

    • Re:Wait, Oracle?? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @10:57PM (#63678805)

      >"But seriously, I've read elsewhere that some enterprises are migrating to Debian, as it's just as solid and is in no (current) danger of going proprietary."

      What Debian would need is to extend update support a little further (not just 5 years) and then get some big players on-board for supporting a Debian EL (like HP/Dell). Then it becomes a good alternative to RHEL. Right now, sure, you could use Debian stable on an HP server, but HP will not talk to you if you have ANY problems. And they won't have official middleware support either. All it would take would be Amazon or some other big company that uses HP/Dell/whatever servers to insist on support and the ball will get rolling quickly.

      • HP needs to get its head in the action then, because Debian is very prominently used in the wild on servers as the "base" distro for Ubuntu. Ie if a vendor supports Ubuntu its being ridiculous if it doesnt also support Debian.

        Ubuntu DOES offer another alternative (And if the suits require it, they can provide support contracts, something debian as an organization cant as a constitutionally bound non profit)

        Anything but Oracle. Shit, *Windows* running its clusteruck linux emulation is preferable, just becaus

        • >"HP needs to get its head in the action then, because Debian is very prominently used in the wild on servers as the "base" distro for Ubuntu. Ie if a vendor supports Ubuntu its being ridiculous if it doesnt also support Debian."

          It might be ridiculous, and it is, but that's the way it is at HP. They might even hang up on you if you are using a binary exact clone of RHEL, instead of the otherwise identical RHEL. And that is even more inexcusable.

          >"Ubuntu DOES offer another alternative (And if the sui

        • Oracle documented somewhere that they'd never ask for money for Linux. It is a support contract only. For that matter I'm fairly sure they support Debian as an OS too.

          They say completely free

          https://www.oracle.com/uk/linu... [oracle.com]

        • And if the suits require it, they can provide support contracts, something debian as an organization cant as a constitutionally bound non profit

          Being a non-profit absolutely in no way precludes an organization from selling something. I work for a not-for-profit company that has hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. Being a not-for-profit just means that whatever money is left at the end of the year after paying the employees, utility bills, etc., which isn't much, stays in the company's bank account instead of being given to owners/shareholders.

    • Really?

      What's the catch?

      We can only assume you're joking when speaking about a company that makes that much money from their Litigation Division.

      But seriously, I've read elsewhere that some enterprises are migrating to Debian, as it's just as solid and is in no (current) danger of going proprietary.

      As many a seasoned greybeard can attest, "solid" is found within that support contract at 3AM when the system shits itself during the final week of the fiscal year-end. Proprietary is only one problem to mitigate when sustaining entities large enough to be defined as enterprises.

  • One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison (Score:5, Informative)

    by Brymouse ( 563050 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @10:15PM (#63678747)

    well it would be easy to write Linus about ZFS "an official letter from Oracle that is signed by their main legal counsel or preferably by Larry Ellison himself that says that yes, it's ok to do so and treat the end result as GPL'd"

    Now that, I might reconsider.

  • Oracle? Seriously? Oracle?! Come on!!!! (Score:4, Funny)

    by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @10:22PM (#63678755)

    The same oracle that stopped supporting OpenJDK 6 and 7, making RedHat to pick up the slack?

    the same oracle that used RedHat's code since 2006 until now for their own linux distro?

    Salty much for the fact that now their engineers will have to work harder to get the code for their RHEL clone?

    I mean, I am as disappointed as anyone else by the latest RedHAt move...

    But Oracle? Seriously?

    • Isn't he saying it won't be a clone? Sounds like they're forking fedora around the same time, which is probably just as good anyway since that branch is quiet at the time anyway.

  • Oracle v Google and Google v Oracle (Score:5, Informative)

    by gavron ( 1300111 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @10:34PM (#63678769)

    Oracle's shown their true colors. They are no knight in white shining armor.
    Too bad, too.

    When you are a dick and hurt the FOSS ecosystem and pretend APIs are
    something you own and nobody can interroperate because the APIs are
    covered by intellectual property (not a thing) or copyright (non-applicable
    as per fair use) or patents (non-applicable) or trademarks (ha!) or trade-
    secrets (lol) you have established your lack of ethics.

    Larry Ellison's minions and Richard Branson's minions and Jeff Bezos' minions
    and Elon Musk's minions can all go burn in space. FOSS will survive if we have
    to fork them all.

    • Re:Oracle v Google and Google v Oracle (Score:5, Funny)

      by christoban ( 3028573 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @11:35PM (#63678869)

      What problem do you have with Elon Musk? I believe he's the only guy to resign from the OpenAI board because they went closed-source, proprietary. And the only guy who seems to give a shit about free speech anymore.

      • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

        by gavron ( 1300111 )

        What problem do you have with Elon Musk? I believe he's the only guy to resign from the OpenAI board because they went closed-source, proprietary. And the only guy who seems to give a shit about free speech anymore.

        Thanks for asking, because I always thought this Slashdot discussion was about "what problem I have" or what "you believe."

        However, I once saw on Wikipedia that it's not about my opinion nor about yours.
        Elon is a moron, and if you want to hitch your horse to his wagon, you should probably realize your horse will soon grow lame,
        and his wagon isn't going very far.

        Best wishes to you, Dunsil.

      • He left because they wouldn't let him control it ... No other reason

        • No, he's talked about this in an interview. Elon formed the company with a few people and they called it "OpenAI" for a reason. You're just making shit up.

  • Personally, what I would like to see is a joint effort/collaboration by all four- Alma, Rocky, SuSE, and Oracle. If they pool their resources and work together, not only could they come out FAR ahead of RedHat, but instantly guarantee that a new, community-driven enterprise linux distro is supported by everyone (hardware giants like HP and Dell, and software giants as well).

    It sounds like a strange group- but nothing unites people quite like a powerful threat.

  • ORACLE = Law firm with a software side business (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @10:41PM (#63678779)

    Oracle now presents itself as an open-source Linux champion

    LOL! With all the stories going around about how ORACLE is really just the land's biggest law firm with a software side-business, this is quite hilarious to hear!

  • "Screven and Coekaerts suggest that "if an incompatibility does affect a customer or ISV, Oracle will work to remediate the problem."

    So basically, "Oracle will work to remediate the problem." They're not forking RHEL they're not working with IBM to provide some kind of compatibility with source, they'll "work to remediate the problem" if one comes up. That doesn't mean shit, lol why is this even a story? This is essentially an Oracle fluff piece with no change to the situation at hand lol.

  • No thanks (Score:4, Informative)

    by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @10:47PM (#63678787)

    I wouldn't touch Oracle Linux with a 40-foot pole.

  • To see one old monopolist dinosaur take on another even more decrepit monopolist dinosaur. May the wartiest, most leathery-skinned of them win!
  • Oracle? Common' man! Seriously, I don't even like using Java these days because of what Oracle did to it. Not going to trust Oracle or their insane CPU scale pricing. Oracle DB is a kind of defacto for older companies, so they will keep trucking, but now RHEL is taking a note from Oracle's playbook. Now that CentOS/RH has so many drivers and apps invested in it, they decide to pull the rug over their supporters (like Oracle did with Java). Sad days for Linux, I knew the ship had sailed when they essentially

    • I don't even like using Java these days because of what Oracle did to it.

      My understanding was that they didn't do anything to it. They weren't improving Java fast enough.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by narcc ( 412956 )

        Oracle simply being Java's stewards is enough to put people off.

        I do think their conservative approach to the language has been wise. Chasing fads is always a mistake and one of Java's biggest strengths is its stability. That's not to say their haven't been missteps, like the nonsense with JavaFX, but it's been mostly good.

    • There is the OpenJDK which is open source under the GPL, while Oracle's license for its Java is that only partially. There are many versions based on OpenJDK including Oracle's. Switch to the OpenJDK if you can. You won't get long term support and lose some performance but get new releases more often.
  • Given Oracle's behaviour over many years. I have to wonder what kind of bridge they're trying to sell. I also have to wonder where the catch is. I further wonder if Oracle can make anything compatible with anything. Fuck, I need a drink. Cheers!

  • I feel like I can speak to this with some authority...
    Generally, the reason any company uses OEL is because they're running DBMS (and related products) and they've been convinced/intimidated by an Oracle rep that there will support compatibilities with any other combination (generally in the form of "Oracle will just blame any performance issues on the OS") which is ironic given the RHEL "binary-compatibility"... and/or more importantly, they've been informed there will be "trouble" with their licensing if

    • Yes, the only reason I could see running Oracle Linux would be to have someplace to run Oracle. It actually sounds like the logical thing to do, if I had to run Oracle for some reason.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dadoo ( 899435 )

      Generally, the reason any company uses OEL is because they're running DBMS (and related products)

      That's exactly why we're running Oracle Linux: we're running it on a single server where we're running Oracle's DBMS. On the other hand:

      they've been convinced/intimidated by an Oracle rep that there will support compatibilities with any other combination

      That didn't happen, for me. Maybe I'm not that smart, but I couldn't get the DBMS working on RHEL, so I tried OEL, and it installed with no problems. Did Oracle make that happen deliberately? Almost certainly, but there are compatibility issues.

  • The branch of linux that leads to RHEL is unfortunately going to fork multiple times. Because each camp will likely want to maintain a 9.2 reference compatibility for years to come innovation will take a hit.

    Oracle will make bold promises of ongoing compatibility. They will also likely put out a number of guides and tools to migrate off of RHEL Oracle will likely also start promoting Oracel linux on competitors clouds. Likely a VMWare partnership with accompanying marketing campaign and conference booth

  • It's too bad that dBrand isn't in this market because given their propensity to "fuck around and find out" with their various products, it would have been hella funny to see these guys engage with Red Hat.

  • SCO ahead and tell me more

  • Does anyone in the Linux community ever stop and think, "Maybe we should focus on some collaboration and consolidation rather than creating yet more options for the other 96% of desktop users?"

    It seems the 'open source' linux model appears to be "Contribute to open source long enough to become successful, then use legal technicalities to close the source you promised to keep open."

    All I know is I've spent countless hours with differing linux distros and never feel at home because everything specific I attem

    • Open Source is kind-of based on the fact that if you do not like something, you can fork it and make your version. If you get like-minded people to join you, you can develop the version and make it useful. For example, Debian decided to make systemd mandatory, not everyone liked it, so some people forked it and created Devuan.

      Since a lot of people who contribute to open source do it on their own free time, you can't really force them to work on a project they do not like.

      All I know is I've spent countless hours with differing linux distros and never feel at home because everything specific I attempt to learn has been deprecated and replaced by something newer and different for no apparent reason.

      Linux is good in that you can modify

      • FYI, there are several ways to restore the old network interface names, which one of the pieces of software I support absolutely requires.

        However you are stuck with the problem that the new naming scheme was designed to address: eth0 will always be the first interface to start, eth1 the next, eth2 next and so on, and it is never guaranteed which interface will start in which sequence. That may not be a problem for some users, but if it is, your best bet may be to live with the new consistent interface nam

        • Debian had a very good fix for this in the old versions. A list binding the interface name to its MAC address. Simple and effective. I can edit that file and give the interfaces new names (for example wan0), or, after replacing a network card I can edit the file and give the new interface the old name. It all just worked.
          However, I guess, systemd does not like this, so changes came.
          At first, the file stopped being updated automatically. If I created it manually, it worked perfectly, just that the OS won't d

          • I think you can still achieve something like what you want via a custom file in /etc/udev/rules.d/. I couldn't tell you the details; it's been a long time since I've had to mess with, but I'm 90% sure it is possible.

            • Yes, as I said, it is possible, but it now sucks if I want to name the interfaces eth0, eth1 and so on, but not in the order they are named automatically. It used to work properly, but they broke it in one of the versions (debian 10 or 11 most likely). Now I need a script to complete the renaming process.

  • No, sorry. I just can't do it. Not when it's Oracle.

  • Oracle basically stole Red Hat's distribution and sold it as their own. Hence RH have implemented various countermeasures to hinder them doing this. The non commercial derivatives have become collateral damage in this war

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by altp ( 108775 )

      Rocky Linux is a commercial derivative, it isn't just Oracle. Alma is a non profit, but, you still get the core Redhat product for free (gratis).

      I don't agree with, or like, what Redhat is doing here. But, I get it. We live in a purely capitalist society, and Redhat/IBM are publicly traded companies. They have to make money. And in this case Redhat is doing most all of the work and other companies (Oracle / Rocky / etc) are selling support for less than Redhat. The alternative is a race to the bottom in sel

  • Your Best Interest (Score:3)

    by Dragonslicer ( 991472 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2023 @07:16AM (#63679375)

    IBM's actions are not in your best interest. By killing CentOS as a RHEL alternative and attacking AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, IBM is eliminating one way your customers save money and make a larger share of their wallet available to Oracle.

    Fixed that to say what they really mean.

  • > you're in breach

    If Oracle is telling the truth then under GPLv2 IBM no longer has the right to distribute Linux or any other GPL software in RHEL.

    Leave it to IBM to fuck up a profitable business acquistion.

    A few years ago I used puppet to switch an all-RHEL/Fedora company to Debian. It was a lot of work but imagine being dependent on IBM. You literally can't do business planning.

  • Red Hat is bad, Oracle is evil.

    Oracle now presents itself as an open-source Linux champion

    I'd like to believe what at least one other commenter has said here, that Oracle's past misdeeds will be remembered and that their initiative will fail. But I don't believe it, not for a minute. As soon as it looks as though Oracle has something to offer, the PHB's will be lining up like rubes to get fleeced, despite the best advice of their senior devs. One Rich Asshole strikes again.

  • Just wait until Linux overtakes Microsoft on the desktop!!

  • This is the legal fight I want to see.
    Does the GPL allow RedHat to use their subscription services to put onerous conditions on their right to redistribute? RedHat does not own the code.

    Also, way to go RedHat for existing long enough to become the actual enemy.

  • I found the mix of pro- and con- redhat arguments to be a wash. I have no stake in the matter anyways.

    But after seeing oracle get involved, i'm cheering redhat...

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