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Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

The comments there are insightful and actually make me think this is the right move:

> Since the earliest days of Linux or MySQL, there were companies set up to profit from others’ contributions. Most recently in Linux, for example, Rocky Linux and Alma Linux both promise “bug for bug compatibility” with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), while contributing nothing toward Red Hat’s success. Indeed, the natural conclusion of these two RHEL clones’ success would be to eliminate their host, leading to their own demise, which is why one person in the Linux space called them the “dirtbags” of open source.

> If there are any real parasites, it's Oracle Linux.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Linux

> Oracle Linux (abbreviated OL, formerly known as Oracle Enterprise Linux or OEL) is a Linux distribution packaged and freely distributed by Oracle, available partially under the GNU General Public License since late 2006.[4] It is compiled from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code, replacing Red Hat branding with Oracle's.

I had no idea that Oracle Linux was essentially RHEL with %s/Red\ Hat/Oracle/g and Oracle has a market cap of $330bn

View on HN

Yup. One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.

I avoid anything Oracle. Their licensing model is hell. Their products are usually terrible compared to competition. Cloud products are subpar. Products tend to require a support contract since it’s proprietary dogshit.

Some tidbits of Oracle and Larry Ellison (founder, CEO):

- in the early days of Oracle DB, it was benchmarked and compared against other RDBMS and Oracle DB was found to have poor performance. Ellison and Oracle tried to get the professor fired and introduced language into their EULA preventing benchmarking [1,2]

- then there is the growing list of controversies documented on Wikipedia [3]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150313140846/https://starcount... (2015, archive.org)

[2] https://danluu.com/anon-benchmark/

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Corporation

SQL Server did something similar too. There’s a famous Reddit post that goes deep comparing it to PostgreSQL but can’t name it for takedown reasons.

Takedown reasons?

Takedown == getting issued a scary cease-and-desist warning letter by high-paid lawyers.

The switch -> https://web.archive.org/web/20170808183612/http://imgur.com/...

The full article: https://web.archive.org/web/20190919121901/https://www.reddi...

Yet people are really happy to buy into Oracle because they have a free tier[0] (which, you probably should avoid anyway[1])

Or they argue to exhaustion that MySQL (not MariaDB) is totally fine for production, despite decades the company who now owns MySQL strangling companies to near death over minutia.

It boggles my mind.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503883

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359

It reminds me of the old saying.

> Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM

Nobody ever got fired for buying, Oracle or Microsoft or any big incumbent. The same could definitely not be said for choosing any free software.

Ironically RHEL is IBM now.

I can imagine people being fired for going with Oracle.

Fail to make your budget work 5 quarters in a row and see how long you last. ;)

Or wait for a legal case to come up: someones getting fired, wether its you or a scapegoat you sacrifice.

No really, nobody ever gets fired for going with Oracle or any of the big blue chip dumpster fires.

Any org with deep enough pockets to afford Oracle at scale has a deep enough org structure and bureaucracy that those huge wasteful projects produce nothing but promotions.

My Oracle free tier VM got destroyed without any info with no prompt or anything.

Then my account was put in such state where I couldn't even pay to upgrade it to paid one

> Or they argue to exhaustion that MySQL (not MariaDB) is totally fine for production, despite decades the company who now owns MySQL strangling companies to near death over minutia.

Who you gonna trust, billion dollar corporation, or man that sold that DB off to them then started making a fork ?

> Who you gonna trust, billion dollar corporation, or man that sold that DB off to them then started making a fork ?

Oh, that’s easy. neither.

I use postgres predominantly.

I mean you can just use it as a free VPS, have backups of everything and you should be fine

Also in terms of security, Oracle's "forks" are decades behind. They managed to make RedHat unsecure with their own dogshit changes.

There are so many CVEs for Oracle specifically that are just bad default usernames and passwords, where they still dispute the CVE reports because it is "intended behaviour".

So ridiculous...

Pretty sure oracle have made a habit of going after security researchers who use responsible disclosure pathways also.

RHEL also introduced some.... interesting changes few times, like re-enabling ciphers removed from upstreams because their clients needed them for something.

I remember our amazement on how we failed audit on having a cipher enabled in OpenSSH version that had that cipher removed in upstream...

I always have to chuckle a little when git tells me that Azure DevOps is too unsecure to connect to because of a deprecated cipher they still use today :D

Losely related: I've audited so many BSD instances that were using MD4/NTHASH in their passwd and shadow files because they wanted to keep compatibility with their Windows infrastructure... it's stunning to see what is still possible in terms of misconfigurations. Things that should have been removed a long time ago.

The neat thing about RHEL is that there's a single 'crypto-policies' package which configures available TLS versions and algorithms for everything in the system: TLS, SSH, IPSec, DNSSEC, Kerberos and so on.

Regarding SSH, the FUTURE policy removes AES128, HMAC-SHA1 and DH Group 14.

But Oracle did manage to make Linux unbreakable, so there’s that.

Oracle is now in the keep customers locked in business rather than the get new customers business.

This is only true it RHEL was self contained OS Project with no Upstream sources itself...

That is not the case, RHEL is not possible with out the wider ecosystem, and to say Rocky Linux is a "dirtbag" for repacking RHEL, would be like saying RedHat is a "dirtbag" for packaging any number of free software projects they consume into their product.

It completely antithetical the free software movement for which Linux is Licensed

However it is perfectly on brand of the "Open Source" corporatist movement that seems to be supplanting free software

> However it is perfectly on brand of the "Open Source" corporatist movement that seems to be supplanting free software

This has been happening on HN too. The vilification of GPL and AGPL as ”not free in the truest sense of the word”, the usage of RMS and his personal image to label the free software movement outdated/fanatical/toxic is a testament to how corporate rebranding efforts have succeeded in replacing free software with open-source — software that is conveniently licensed so that corporations can bake it into their product without a single concern for the longevity or well-being of the developer or the software itself.

I think you mean anti-copyleft.

Free Software and Open Source are essentially the same, despite the philosophical differences. The issue here is against the copyleft (GPL and AGPL).

>>Free Software and Open Source are essentially the same,

No ... no they are not

>>despite the philosophical differences.

And those differences are HUGE and make them incompatible

Well, go and check: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

Then see how many of those are OSI approved licences (thus open source).

Yes, anything the FSF blesses also qualifies as open source. Can you articulate what point you're trying to make, that this supports?

The inverse is also true (barring possibly some insignificant exceptions). Can you name any mainstream open source license that is not considered free software?

Free implies open source. Open source does not imply free.

Name an open source license that you don’t consider free software, then. Note that “source available” (Business Software License, etc.) is not the same thing as “open source”.

Any non-copy left license is not free software.

Wrong according to the FSF:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#apache2

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#X11License

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#FreeBSD

FsF have been taken over by corporatists from the open source movement and is shell of it's former self

When did that happen in your opinion?

It was like this at least 20 years ago.

It's not about what you consider or not. The Free Software movement is very clear. It is about the freedom of the user: "I, the copyright owner of my own code, allow you to use my code as long as you let your users have (some kind of) access to my code in the product they buy".

Really as an end user, I just don't understand who would be against the Free Software philosophy: either you don't care, or you want as much control as you can on what you buy, but why would you ever say: "I don't want those weird licenses that give me more access to the stuff I buy, I want the other ones that make it completely proprietary and inaccessible".

Of course as a company, you want permissive licenses, such that you can use it for free, but keep it proprietary (because companies like to think that this one bugfix they made is very strategic IP).

Name a license that is open source but not free software.

MIT, BSD, Apache, anything that is open source but allows you to make the code proprietary.

> When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

You are wrong according to the FSF. They consider all the licenses you mentioned to be free software licenses.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#apache2

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#X11License

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#FreeBSD

Right, my bad.

Permissive licenses are "free" in the sense that they allow to distribute free software (e.g. I can distribute a binary together with its sources even if they are MIT-licensed, and that would be free), but they also allow to distribute non-free software (e.g. I can take MIT code and distribute a proprietary binary).

Copyleft licenses enforce the freedom downstream.

I guess my original point is that I don't understand why people don't like copyleft, because copyleft enforces free binaries.

Does that make sense? Thanks for the correction.

Yes, that sounds right to me. “Free Software” and “open source” are synonyms, with the FSF preferring to use one term over the other, despite recognizing they’re synonyms, because they are ideologues who are obsessed with language use. Permissive and copyleft are two different types of free software/open source licenses, with the FSF preferring copyleft.

To answer your underlying question: I like permissive licenses because I am not ideologically opposed to unfree software, and I’d rather software be used by a company than not at all.

> I like permissive licenses because I am not ideologically opposed to unfree software, and I’d rather software be used by a company than not at all.

My opinion differs here. First, the free philosophy is nice for me as a user: for instance say I buy a Marshall "smart" speaker, for which the software kind of sucks and is essentially not maintained (but still it connects to the internet...). I don't see how it would hurt Marshall to enable an open source ROM. After all, they sell the hardware, right? And a big part of the software running on that speaker is open source; they did not pay anything for it, and more often than not, they "forget" attribution for permissive code.

But companies try to minimize their costs, and contributing a bugfix back upstream is seen as a cost (conveniently ignoring that they did not pay for the software in the first place). With a copyleft license, of course the company can keep ignoring the license (like they do for attribution in permissive licenses), but at least it gives the developer an argument for contributing back upstream.

And it doesn't have to be GPL. LGPL and MPL are easy to handle.

> I’d rather software be used by a company than not at all.

If the software has value, I am convinced that they can deal with copyleft (see Linux). And if the majority of open source software was copyleft, then companies would be used to it. Copyleft is really not that bad, it is just perceived as a source of cost by companies.

It sounds like you're implying that permissive licenses don't count as free software licenses, but that has never been true. FSF has always said that permissive licenses are free software licenses and that permissively licensed software is free software. However, they advocate the position that this might not be the best way to protect all downstream users' freedom.

I do, and it has been true (I believe it still is, that's fundamental to the notion of freedom): https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

Right, so you might have, for example, FreeBSD, which as distributed by the FreeBSD developers is free software, but which can also potentially be used in a proprietary downstream product, which is not free software. The FreeBSD developers did not deny users any of the four freedoms. They just allowed other people to potentially do so.

This Venn diagram is FSF's view of the taxonomy:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html

I was wrong indeed, thanks for the precision :-). So:

Permissive licenses are free in the sense that they allow making free software (but they also allow making non-free software).

GPLv3 enforces the complete derived work to be free. LGPLv3 says that the particular library should stay free.

GPLv2, LGPLv2 and MPLv2 say that the source code (either of the whole derived work or just the library) should stay free, but tivoization allows making the product non-free.

Is that about right?

That matches my understanding. Some people might potentially only say "tivoized" (or a more explicit "incorporated in a product that prevents the user from modifying it in practice" or "incorporated in a locked-down product" or something) rather than "non-free" for a hardware product, but I guess "non-free" could also make sense for a hardware product.

That's spot on.

That was what I meant initially: in HN there's a strong opinion against copyleft, not necessarily free software.

I get why companies can make more profit in a world where most software is under a permissive license. I just don't really see how it benefits users and, more importantly, developers as individuals.

To me, writing software in my free time and open sourcing it under a permissive license is shooting myself in the foot. I did the work for free, it may as well benefit me as a user. At minimum it should be MPLv2.

Please note that "Tivoisation" isn't what Tivo actually did and both the GPLv2 and GPLv3 ban "Tivoisation" but allow what Tivo actually did. "Tivoisation" as it is popularly known refers to blocking the running of modified GPL code, while what Tivo actually did was block running their proprietary software (their UI etc) on top of modified GPL code (here Linux). Both GPL versions block the former while allowing the latter. At least according to Software Freedom Conservancy.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...

That's interesting, I remember thinking that the original notion of Tivoization did apply to what Tivo did (including what you describe).

I wonder if this is a point of disagreement between FSF and SFC -- I know they now have several disagreements.

In a similar time frame, I criticized attestation features in trusted computing because they would allow (in fact one of their main purposes was to allow) network services to allow only certain software configurations to interact with them. And I thought I was talking about a similar concept!

Thanks for sharing those links.

You may be thinking of SFLC, their disagreements with FSF are much larger. SFC's disagreements with FSF are mostly related to keeping RMS around.

Attestation is indeed a big problem today, especially around Android devices and proprietary apps that won't run on libre Android distributions. The attestation feature of WebAuthn could also become a problem, but that is somewhat mitigated by the Apple passkeys not being attestable.

It absolutely does. The difference between these two movements is purely philosophical; practically they describe the same things, they just do it in a different way and for different reasons.

(that doesn't mean the difference isn't important though)

Yes, not making it ridiculously easy for corporate to make money off someone's else work without giving anything back is a huge difference.

I don't really get why people are for non-copyleft licenses. LGPL is fine license.

https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3

So it changed to BSD yet still lost. Your point ?

> no they are not

Yes they are, according to people who use both terms. All “free software” licenses are also “open source” licenses and vice versa.

Free Software is Open Source, but Open Source is not necessarily Free Software.

You're wrong and probably mistaking these terms with copyleft and permissive licenses. Both of these kinds of licenses are both Free Software and Open Source.

In practice, pretty much every Open Source license is also Free Software license and vice versa (there are some very nitpicky exceptions, but I guarantee they're not where you'd expect them to be).

The following things are all true:

* the term "open source" predates the term "free software" in the FSF sense

* "open source" was proposed as a synonym for "free software" in the late 90s

* liguistically, the term "free software" emphasizes freedom, while "open source" emphasizes source-available

* there is no law mandating everyone use OSI's definition of "open source"

* consequently, there is ambiguity in the term "open source", ambiguity exploitable by those who want the social cachet of free software but are not philosophically aligned with it

* there is ambiguity in the term "free software" as well but don't worry, if they mean it in the FSF sense they will certainly take the time to explain

I humbly submit therefore that the GP framing is essentially correct, that RMS was right not to endorse the term "open source", and that whatever OSI says the term is philosophically compromised and should be "considered harmful".

> , the usage of RMS and his personal image to label the free software movement outdated/fanatical/toxic

What if i love and use the AGPL, but also won't involve myself with the FSF because I think they are runining the movement and also definitely want no direct association with RMS.

I think RMS is an active harm to the cause of Free Software.

Yeah. Open source is a wealth transfer from developers to corporations. I've reached the conclusion that anything other than AGPLv3 means we're working against our own interests. Giving up the leverage provided by the GPL benefits only corporations.

I think I get the gist of your sentiment, and somewhat agree, but let me clarify.

GPL, only enforces redistribution of software you distribute, "to" the people you desteibute it to, aka customers.

Most other licenses (MIT, Apache, BSD, etc) don't require any code redistribution (though some require attribution).

GPL ~= redistribution to customers Other ~= no redistribution

Red Hat is complying with the GPL requirements even for BSD, Apache, and BSD licensed code, which I think is good.

I think a more sinister trend forming is around open core, and essentially proprietary code mixed with no code redistribution at all. This makes open core essentially closed source for all intents and purposes. Companies are using open core simply for free marketing and to drive technology adoption in the sales/marketing funnels.

I'm not going to call Rocky or Alma "dirtbags" (does anybody use that phrase these days?) but comparing what Red Hat does to Rocky is misleading.

RHEL Clones: Take finished source code, rebuild, test, release.

RHEL: Work upstream to develop features / submit features upstream before inclusion in RHEL, maintain specific versions of upstream, test hundreds of upstreams together to make sure they can be shipped together as an operating system, develop "glue" software like Anaconda to install + manage the whole thing, take source, build, test, release, accept bugs, start over again for next minor release or major release as needed.

And, of course, this elides all the certification work that makes RHEL an attractive enough project to rebuild in the first place because people want very specifically a RHEL compatible distribution to run an application or applications on top of.

What people get pissed at Red Hat about isn't that they don't get to access the source. They're pissed they don't get the convenience. Largely speaking, the people who get pissed aren't concerned about Free Software, either - they just want easy to run binaries. As I understand it "get binaries for free" is not mandated by the four freedoms. The source code is still out there for people to study, change, use, and redistribute. That seems entirely compatible with the free software ethos - but incompatible with the freeloader ethos.

Rocky and Alma are doing exactly what CentOS pre-Stream did for _six_ years. Now they're frustrated that their decision to kill the CentOS idea didn't stick?

Red Hat might have the legal right to gate their product, but it seems really slimy to build RHEL on the work of who knows how many people that publish it for free and then to put road blocks around their derivative.

I don't really like reductionist blaming, but I feel basically forced to wonder what Red Hat would be doing if IBM wasn't involved.

"it seems really slimy to build RHEL on the work of who knows how many people that publish it for free and then to put road blocks around their derivative"

I'm always curious that people get angry at Red Hat profiting on the work of others, but few people get angry at the companies that use a RHEL clone to run their business and pay nothing and contribute nothing.

Red Hat is still releasing source code. The only thing that it's not doing is making it super-convenient to rebuild exactly its product.

Seriously - for most purposes CentOS Stream is just fine if what you want is a distro that feels like RHEL. Its one drawback is that it's not a one-for-one clone of RHEL, which generally only really matters if you are using it to run your business. Which gets me back to - why are people so pissed at Red Hat but not all the organizations that make money using RHEL but don't pay towards its development?

> Red Hat is still releasing source code. The only thing that it's not doing is making it super-convenient to rebuild exactly its product.

Releasing only to their customers and only if not redistributed. If you held redhat to the same standard for the open source they redistribute they couldn't exist.

> Rocky and Alma are doing exactly what CentOS pre-Stream did for _six_ years. Now they're frustrated that their decision to kill the CentOS idea didn't stick?

CentOS wasn't selling support contracts tho.

Not that I think anything they are doing is in any way wrong mind you.

To be fair, neither is Rocky.

https://sam.gov/opp/2e0365ce1e3c4c179b50fb15573d68e4/view

The RESF / Rocky Linux project does not sell support contracts. That is a contract for CIQ. Any company is free to sell support services for Rocky Linux (and many do, including OpenLogic, MontaVista, CIQ, TuxCare, etc).

Yes according to NASA

Take a look at this [1] and tell me one company that comes close. RH has surely made questionable decisions, and yes that seems to be increasing since IBM. But the heat they get is precisely because people are used to having free lunch and then feel it's been taken away. I don't see AWS, Oracle, and others getting the same treatment for benefiting immensely from open source, without contributing much in return. Would you rather have an industry dominated by RH-like companies or the others?

[1] https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-program-office/c...

Without exaggerating, I think I've read maybe two kind comments about Oracle _ever_. Their handling of the Sun IP alone could overfill thread after thread with vitriol.

And I think an analogy is apt. Someone was one telling me that religions that are slightly different (think Protestantism versus Catholicism) lead to far greater strife than religions that are vastly different (like Buddhism and Catholicism.) Maybe people are just louder about the things they care about and feel close to.

I read this comment, said to myself hell yeah, this person gets it, then realized it was my friend JZB!!! On point my friend, on point!

I don't dislike your sentiment and don't see Rocky Linux as dirtbags, but I think it is important for GPL that you have to[1] provide source only if you provide binaries (IANAL, lawyers correct me). So you should be able to have a business where you sell software and the people who buy receive the GPL'd source code (that they can then modify and share). You don't have to develop in public, or use version control programs: participate in the whole "GitHub culture".

GPL tries to guarantee an environment for user freedom (not developer convenience, like permissive licenses). It has builtin protection against someone closing the source. It doesn't protect against some company pulling an Internet Explorer on you (i.e. providing a free equivalent) with your own code, because this doesn't directly concern user freedoms. You don't have to be actively helping them though.

I think ultimately free-of-charge mirrors should exist, but I see good potentials in companies discovering business merits of GPL, and hopefully AGPL. We need more vigor for those, after getting lucky once with Linux. We cannot rely on good will of corporations (only enforced law works on them), so any sign of luring them into copyleft somehow is a good thing. This would be a long road, but who knows what could happen in the current "AI" chaos and regulation scares.

[1] Of course only have to assuming that you are not the original author and you're building on someone else's code received under GPL.

I thought that was well known, it's not like they were secretive about it, in fact they openly advertised it. Their sales pitch, I think was, that many customers ran Oracle software on RHEL, and this way they would have a single provider of support for both the OS and the software running on it.

Given Oracle's rather well-earned reputation, that does not sound like an attractive proposal to me, but there's a chance orgs that are on the hook for anything Oracle already might not share that assessment.

IIRC, Oracle's move to eat part of Red Hat's lunch was considered the reason Red Hat stopped making the kernel source available in the form of mainline tree + patches, thus making it less convenient for Oracle's staff to provide support at the same level of expertise as Red Hat, but I don't think anyone working at Red Hat has commented on this on the record.

When Oracle started offering support for the oracle db on RHEL, whenever there are performance issues and other issues, Oracle used to blame RHEL. So oracle DBAs are trained to go back Redhat for issues. Usually, these support issues bounce back and forth: Oracle blames Redhat, which says it’s an oracle issue. In the mean time, oracle support folks just buy sweet time. Then came Oracle enterprise linux: oracle supporting the whole stack, OS and databases. Which enterprise customer doesn’t want that. Not only that, many corporate customers of RHEL switched to Oracle Linux, as oracle charges way less for each installation.

As an employee, I dont think anyone can. I'd make speculation here, but we all know how that ends up being twisted into misunderstanidng. The current kernel source is available on gitlab though (centos-streams) because now centos streams is upstream of rhel kernel.

Is not this something what Open Source exactly suppose to allow you to do ?

I have no love for Oracle but I would imagine one of the reasons Oracle embraced RedHat Enterprise Linux early on was the fact they could fork it if it was in their interest - this was tremendous value for RedHat for a time and helped its establishment as leading Linux for Enterprise.

Remember also what RedHat itself "stands on the shoulders of the giants" - there are a lot of packages which RedHat includes. Years ago when I worked at MySQL AB RedHat used to include MySQL packages, say they are covered by their "subscription" but have no revenue share with MySQL AB (as creators)

Note I'm not complaining I'm saying this is exactly how things upposed to work - MySQL got great value from being Open Source and allowing Linux distributions to include it (and make money on it) freely.

    MySQL got great value

Mindshare? Market share? Support contracts?

It has a few add-ons.

The "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" includes full btrfs, extensive device support (that is removed from the stock kernel), is tuned for the eponymous database, and is always more current. There are several scenarios where it is very attractive.

Oracle bought K-Splice several years ago, which was the first rebootless patch solution for Linux. It's only available with a premium license; Kernelcare is a lot cheaper.

Supported Oracle Linux versions are also available for WSL1 inside of Windows.

  C:\>wsl.exe -l -o
  The following is a list of valid distributions that can be installed.
  The default distribution is denoted by '*'.
  Install using 'wsl --install -d <Distro>'.

  NAME                                   FRIENDLY NAME
  Ubuntu                                 Ubuntu
  Debian                                 Debian GNU/Linux
  kali-linux                             Kali Linux Rolling
  Ubuntu-18.04                           Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
  Ubuntu-20.04                           Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
  Ubuntu-22.04                           Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
  OracleLinux_7_9                        Oracle Linux 7.9
  OracleLinux_8_7                        Oracle Linux 8.7
  OracleLinux_9_1                        Oracle Linux 9.1
  SUSE-Linux-Enterprise-Server-15-SP4    SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP4
  openSUSE-Leap-15.4                     openSUSE Leap 15.4
  openSUSE-Tumbleweed                    openSUSE Tumbleweed

Oracle Linux came into existence shortly after Red Hat bought JBoss. As Oracle had also bought BEA Weblogic (IIRC), this was not taken well.

OEL is dependent on RHEL for patches, so how can it be "always more current."?

The UEK is more dedicated to following long-term-release kernels. Oracle's re-wrap is known as the "Red Hat Compatible Kernel."

v7-rhck-3.10.0-1160.92.1.0.1

v7-uek-5.4.17-2136.320.7.1

v8-rhck-4.18.0-477.13.1

v8-uek-5.15.0-102.110.5

v9-rhck-5.14.0-284.11.1

v9-uek-5.15.0-102.110.5.1

Kernel version 3.10 has always been stock rhel7's version, but the UEK has jumped through v4 to v5.

Red Hat made a big deal about io_uring availability in v9, but I am guessing that it is available in v8's UEK.

I will say that the Oracle database group's support for v9 is very poor at this point; for some reason, they are holding to v8, and releasing few products for the newer platform.

> The "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" includes full btrfs, extensive device support (that is removed from the stock kernel), is tuned for the eponymous database, and is always more current. There are several scenarios where it is very attractive.

I'd never go for btrfs in anything enterprise.

But it does annoy me how RHEL moves normal open source software to the separate repos that are available with extra support packages, it just makes managing it annoying

It also annoys me to great extents when Red Hat removes support for SAS raid cards that are perfectly usable.

Oracle fixes that.

Removed it midstream or between releases ?

RH generally only removes features in major releases. The exception is when they introduce features as a technology preview. Those are subject to potential removal before the EOL of that major release, though they rarely do.

That was what I had thought. I'm confused with the original statement being a problem as both vendor and the os both need to support the hardware. If there is a problem with the firmware who will RHEL go to keep its agreements ?

Don't forget OCFS2 as well! I am surprised that HN didn't know OEL wasn't just s/redhat/oracle/

> Most recently in Linux, for example, Rocky Linux and Alma Linux both promise “bug for bug compatibility” with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), while contributing nothing toward Red Hat’s success.

CentOS was huge towards equipping smaller IT departments, startups and student on the RHEL ways, allowing them to jump on "real RH" when they got bigger. Alma Linux is the same. Rocky Linux does sell support, but even then it's still advertising RHEL.

CentOS was also huge towards allowing a lot of larger companies to just run CentOS in production instead of RHEL and avoid paying anything at all.

However you may feel about Red Hat's actions, I'd trust that folks at Red Hat have done enough legwork to figure out that "CentOS as a loss leader for RHEL" wasn't working out the way people like to imagine it would.

(Note: I am a former Red Hat employee, but I do not have and haven't had specific access to any data estimating what CentOS Linux was expected to add to or subtract from the bottom line. But I feel pretty sure that many deals won and lost have been examined, many customers spoken to, and numbers crunched to inform their actions.)

And I'm not sure I'd agree with their analysis, but they're clearly free to make the decision.

If larger companies can run CentOS in production, they also can run Debian or any other distro without a support contract. They could even use a competing loss leader distro like OpenSuse Leap.

Yes, they could. But they (often) don't. The certification / training ecosystem that exists around RHEL has a lot value, even if a lot of folks like to handwave it away. The engineering that goes into RHEL and the very predictable lifecycle has a lot of value, too. I'm not going to say that Debian or SUSE aren't equally good, engineering-wise, but it seems like a lot of large companies have chosen RHEL clones over Debian. (Not all! I am sure plenty of companies do as you suggest with Debian.)

Don't get me wrong - I think it'd be great if Debian became the standard, assuming that meant that companies helped develop Debian and poured resources into it as a commons. That'd be much better than depending on Red Hat to do all the work and then not paying for it.

Many companies just needed some linux. So, choosing between Debian and Centos was pretty much choosing between rpm and apt. Many companies were not choosing between the commercial RHEL and Centos to begin with. Now they are just fine with just containers.

And those companies should be just fine with Stream or some other option, right?

They are fine with Alpine tbh. And something that allows to host k8s.

Lots of companies do contribute to Debian and this has been happening for a long time. To start with Canonical employs people to contribute back. For a while HPE was donating large amounts of server hardware. Several companies (early HP, ARM etc) contributed lots of work on new ports like arm64, hppa, etc. Almost the entirety of the LTS effort is funded by companies. The current status is summarised on on the wiki:

https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Funding https://wiki.debian.org/ExternalEntities

It used to be for standardization, but I've seen more commercial tools provide Debian / Ubuntu support than Red Hat lately, since the late 2010s. I also think the amount of changes and the issues with licensing here mean that more people might up and convert to Debian than before. But IDK. I also hear that more ML work is done on Debian, and yes - with the containers becoming big - less need to run any particular linux, so I could see swapping out the underlying Linux.

And from a company perspective, Red Hat has already done a big swap out from satallite to Foreman / Puppet to really pushing Ansible. Similarly, they've stopped doing oVirt in favor of cloud style OpenStack, nee OpenShift. Which is great if you're building your own cloud fabric, but not really the VMWare / HyperV competitor oVirt was which is something lots of mid size orgs need. ProxMox still seems to be going.

And for people who aren't paying for support - I imagine they have skilled in house teams that can certainly figure out Debian if they've been orchestrating CENTOS and now Alma say.

Especially distributions such as Debian Stable LTS.

> CentOS was huge towards equipping smaller IT departments, startups and student on the RHEL ways, allowing them to jump on "real RH" when they got bigger.

And it turned out near-nobody did so they turned it into stream so you could no longer have "same as RHEL" version.

i mean you can do that now with a RHEL dev licenses, you have up to 16 free servers

There's nothing stopping them from using CentOS still? The latest rolling releases are so close to RHEL you'd never notice. Use an older more reliable version locked release that works to your needs and update periodically. these problems are solved for small shops quite easily.

Regardless of your views of cloning a commercial Linux distro like that, alling Rocky Linux and Alma Linux 'dirtbags' misses the point of the entire reason they exist in the first place, RedHat discontinuing CentOS (and drastically shortening the support window on CentOS 8).

who called them dirtbags? I've seen this mentioned a few times but I haven't seen any source for it

It's in one of the comments on the linked article, and was reposted in the top comment in the thread in which you're replying. It seems to be sourced originally from here:

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3697733/chatgpt-s-parasiti...

Besides it isn't true they don't contribute. As you say, they are filling the gap left by CentOS, and that helps sustaining an ecosystem that benefits RHEL.

Isn't redhat profiting from all the software upstream to themselves?

I'm reminded of the definition of a linux distribution: a package manager and a source repository.

(that said, unbreakable linux, yeah)

Redhat contributes back to upstream in a lot of cases. I don't know if Rocky and co do or not but Redhat definitely does.

I'm not denying that important point.

But imagine being a contributor to a package which redhat incorporates and using it via centos/rocky.

RedHat actually helps Rocky and co by basing RHEL on Centos Stream. Rocky and co can now file bugs on Centos Stream and have it fixed faster for their distribution. Before they could not do that. They had to report further upstream and had to wait until that landed in RHEL. Also RedHat is helped by these fixes. Only winners here.

IIRC they even have a tool to "convert" a RHEL system into Oracle. And it's not just RHEL, they shamelessly distribute AWX (upstream for Ansible Tower, a product 100% made by RH from scratch) under a different name without contributing anything back. Oracle is truly a parasite of the open source ecosystem.

The only outcome I see for these "business models" at Oracle, Rocky, Alma, etc. is increasingly less availability of software for us regular users. Say what you might about RH but you can't argue that they put out massive amounts of open source code out there for all to use. Or they did anyway.

Redhat bought ansible tower, they did not write it from scratch.

Thanks, I stand corrected. But to my point, they bought something and open sourced it, only to have it used against them.

When Red Hat didn't yet provide free download and free hobbyist licensing for their SO CentOS is what allowed me to learn the RHEL way and learn enough to pay 560 euro to get RHCSA certified.

I can see their problem with Oracle, but Rocky linux is probably bringing them business.

If my job wouldn't mandate a specific distro, I would use Rocky Linux where the management doesn't want to pay for support, and RHEL whenever possible.

I know there move to CentOS Stream cost them my business, Since that announcement 2 years ago I have replaced all Licensed RHEL servers with Ubuntu Servers...

Which is an odd choice when comparing RH and Canonical. The former has been almost religious about living to the open source ideals, going so far as open sourcing products they purchase, and making sure new products they create have opensource upstreams. I don't think the same can be said of Canonical which seems at every turn to in need of $ so they try desperate ploys to monetize new projects they work on by developing them in house and dropping releases, or trying to lock up markets and charge for features not available in the open source version.

So, while they definitely aren't ideal, its hard to point to another company that does more across as much of the opensource ecosystem. Maybe google these days? But one needs only look at some of the google projects governance model to see the difference between RH and Google.

>>The former has been almost religious about living to the open source ideals

Pre-IBM sure... Post IBM hardly

>>its hard to point to another company that does more across as much of the opensource ecosystem. Maybe google these days?

Really, you think google is a good example of Open Source... wow how far we have come..

Google worse than Microsoft when it comes to the EEE model

You are correct Canonical is not ideal, but I find them to be more ethical and upfront than Post-IBM RedHat and for sure google

>> Post IBM hardly

Can you put some substance on that statement?

> The former has been almost religious about living to the open source ideals, going so far as open sourcing products they purchase, and making sure new products they create have opensource upstreams.

We are having this conversation on an article about them doing their best to avoid sharing their source code in order to kill their downstreams.

Yeah... had it not been for CentOS, I would've never touched anything in the RHEL-side of things after I discovered Ubuntu in the 10/12 era.

Because CentOS existed, I made sure most of my open source work would run just as well on all RHEL derivatives as it does on Debian.

If Rocky didn't exist, I would quickly drop all my RHEL support because operating thousands of test machines and containers based on UBI and having to keep up with their licensing game would cost too much of my time.

Rocky and Alma are the only reason devs like me still build anything for RHEL.

I'd have to check if it is still the case but RHEL has provided free developer licenses for RHEL for years (decades?).

EDIT: checked and it still exist and allow usage of up to 16 physical or virtual nodes for development " to develop software (including open source software), perform prototyping or quality assurance testing and/or for demonstration purposes.

And those conditions are exactly what the OP meant by a licensing game.

There is notting in Jeff Geerling's project list[1] that warrant hundred's of rhel machines and containers at any given time.

Containers are mostly ephemerals when used for build and test purpose.

[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/projects

The fact that I have to spend more than 5 seconds considering how to integrate my Red Hat Subscription into my test builds (for dozens of projects) means I won't do it.

That's why I stuck with Rocky Linux instead of just dropping all RHEL support entirely.

And there are _a lot_ of test runs where I have more than 20-30 test containers running simultaneously with Rocky Linux 8 and 9.

Do I have to write new software that limits my test infrastructure to only run 16 tests at a time or something idiotic like that? Do I have to even wonder about that using Debian, Arch, heck even Amazon Linux? No.

> The fact that I have to spend more than 5 seconds considering how to integrate my Red Hat Subscription into my test builds

So basically you are saying the author of an ansible book do not care spending a couple of minutes understanding a simple process to automatise it.

Sounds like great advertising for your books really.

FYI containers aren't their own entity for subscription management purposes. A subscribed host can run as many containers as it wants, the host's subscriptions work inside the containers.

(That said I agree that dealing with subscription-manager at all is a lot more annoying than ... not having to do so with RHEL derivatives!)

It’s a fairly recent thing though

It has been a thing for the last 5 years at the very least.

Red Hat recently turned 30 years old as a company.

So yeah, 5 years is pretty recent, unless you started using linux last week.

I said at least 5 years because I know I used it 5 years ago in a previous company and I am pretty sure about it but it may have been earlier.

If you have a source with the original announcement, by all means share it.

EDIT: found an announcement of march 2016 so we are talking +7years at least.

Still fairly recent unless you started using linux last week.

You can also use them for production. Scroll to the bottom of https://sso.redhat.com/auth/realms/redhat-external/protocol/... and follow the link to the terms & conditions:

> The Individual Developer Subscriptions allow you (as an individual, natural person) to use certain Red Hat Subscription Services in connection with Red Hat Software for Individual Development Use and for Individual Production Use subject to these Program Terms at no cost.

> “Individual Production Use” means any use other than for Individual Development Use including, but not limited to, using the Software (a) in a production environment, (b) with live data and/or applications and/or (c) for backup instances

Red Hat also have a no-cost Developer Subscription for Teams agreement for organizations.

I don't really agree. RHEL is nothing special. Important for Enterprise and thus free availability is handy for people having an interest in becoming a sysadmin to learn it. Dogfooding work stuff is the only reason I'd consider using it or its derivatives at home. But I don't care even about that and my stuff all runs BSD :P

But other distros are much better IMO.

There's good reasons that a totally free distro like Debian is forked so much. It's just a really solid base. Software doesn't need to have a business model to be great.

I'd be a lot sadder to see Debian disappear than RHEL and its derivatives.

There is no single criterion by which you can decide which distro is better.

All I know is anecdotes. RHEL 7 and Ubuntu 14.04 came out around the same time. Around May, upstream QEMU started getting bug reports from Canonical developers that you couldn't reset a virtual machine that had been created in 12.04 and migrated to 14.04 due to some firmware incompatibility.

In RHEL we had started testing cross-version migration 6 months in advance.

There's a huge difference between Rocky/Alma, and Oracle. Oracle actually tries to steal RHEL business. They offer support, which I think is ludicrous when they don't even build the product.

Alma/Rocky aren't to my knowledge offering any support (and if they plan to, they shouldn't). Are customers cross-shopping RHEL with Alma? You either want support, and buy RHEL, or you don't, and you use something else (Alma/Rocky, or Debian/Ubuntu etc..)

Rocky does offer support, but your comment about Oracle still stands. I believe Rocky works with Red Hat.

Rocky can offer support on helping you install it. But they can't offer real support. They can't fix bugs or do any real work on RHEL beyond requesting that Red Hat accept a fix. If Red Hat declines, Rocky can't even ship their own fix.

Doesn't Rocky offer their own repositories, where if they had an upstream fix that was important enough, they could just include it in their own repositories?

They can't do so while claiming to be bug-for-bug compatible with RHEL.

Yeah I really think people are way out over their skis if they think that Red Hat/IBM doesn't have at least a somewhat justifiable case to make here. You can still disagree, but at least you need to admit that you can understand why they would be pissed about something like Rocky. They do offer downloads of RHEL for free (or is that gone too?) for anybody not using it commercially, this isn't some poor student cloning RHEL because they couldn't afford it or anything like that.

>The comments there are insightful and actually make me think this is the right move

They are not. Maybe this is how the YC/VC crowd sees everything. Dollar went in, two dollars come out. Two points:

1) RHEL is not an island. It uses (and contributes) upstream.

2) They undercut the spirit, if not the letter, of GPL by forbidding customers from releasing the sources. Don't want derivatives ? Don't use copyleft free software. Can't have your cake and use it too.

I have no raw feelings towards organizations trying to keep themselves in business, but I'd be happier if it was literally anyone besides Oracle.

The complementary relationship is also true.

RHEL became the enterprise Linux distribution because it was the one used and supported by Oracle, back then, when many companies still used Oracle as their database.

I am talking about 15 years ago.

Even nowadays at work, we all use Ubuntu in our workstations, but the servers run CentOS (another repackaging of RH).

Without the support of Oracle, we all would be using SUSE in our servers, instead of a Red Hat based distro.

We just use Debian for everything (sooo much less issues than with RHEL or Ubuntu ), but the RHEL bias is high in enterprise clients we support.

Paid for Oracle Linux, can confirm.

Prusa has made a similar statement regarding their open source 3D printers. A lot of cheap knock offs leveraging their work …

https://blog.prusa3d.com/the-state-of-open-source-in-3d-prin...

To be fair to Oracle I believe they have their own "unbreakable" kernel packages, though they do ship Red Hat's kernel as well.

It has ocfs2 working out of the box which is a pretty good clustered file system.

> which is why one person in the Linux space called them the “dirtbags” of open source.

That's funny, because that's how I tend to feel about Red Hat.

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