https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/oracle-is-the-1-contribu...
Oracle actually does not undercut the least expensive Red Hat support offerings. Oracle Linux support is $499/year for basic, and $1,399/year for premier. Both tiers allow 24x7 access to file service requests (SRs).
https://www.oracle.com/linux/support/
Red Hat has a more complicated support structure, starting with workstation-self support: $179, workstation-8x5 support: $299, server-self support: $349, server-8x5 support: $799, server-24x7 support: $1,299.
https://www.redhat.com/en/store/linux-platforms
It would be interesting if IBM did exactly what this Oracle blog suggests:
"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."
Also, considering that OEL is downstream from RHEL how sustainable do we really think it would be for RHEL to downstream from OEL? How long would OEL invest and maintain in OS components that don’t directly benefit their specific offerings? Is there evidence to suggest there is any truth behind that offer? In my years of following the Linux ecosystem Oracle’s niche seems to have largely evolved around performance optimizations that solve specific problems they experience with other products or feature enhancements to facilitate new developments within their product ecosystem (which is still great for the community!) but what I have not seen is general purpose stewardship of the ecosystem of packages outside the kernel. I have no doubts they have made contributions of that nature but that has certainly not been a constant in what I have personally observed thus far. Perhaps I’m looking in the wrong places but I genuinely don’t believe Oracle would truly take on that responsibility nor do I believe that they would be anywhere near as effective as Red Hat at executing it
Oracle also ships a few Linux userspace utilities outside of the main yum repos; the btrfs utilities come to mind. There really isn't any obvious btrfs performance need within Oracle or its products, which runs contrary to the spirit of your observations; in fact the Oracle database is explicitly not supported on btrfs.
Note 2290489.1: "Oracle DB has specifically said that they do not support using BTRFS filesystems... BTRFS is optimized for non-database workloads."
I will also somewhat agree with you in circumspection on the quality of Oracle's 24x7 support. I have endured frustrating delays on SRs for various reasons, and have been forced to escalate in the past. I don't know if IBM's $1,299 24x7 support is good, but I can say that Oracle's has been astonishingly bad - be prepared to escalate, which usually moves things along.
I think that, if IBM decided to let go of all of their RHEL developers, Oracle is certainly capable of assuming this burden.
This seems like a non-sequitur in a conversation about open-source OSes.
Red Hat does not maintain all of the code in RHEL - they repackage and patch everything taken from other developers. Very few packages are authored solely by them.
I don't know what relationship Oracle has with the current owner of the UNIX System V source (appears to be The Open Group), but Oracle is responsible for vastly more of the kernel and userspace in Solaris than RHEL.
This is false. Red Hat does maintain code that is shipped by default with RHEL. It should be noted though, the number of packages that are part of default RHEL installation is small. Also upstream first policy basically means, any proposed patch must first be merged in upstream before being backported to rhel. If that does not make them maintainers, I don't know what will. Being sole author and maintainer are not the same thing.
Solaris was effectively killed off in 2017 when Oracle laid off most people working on it. And Open Solaris is dead too.
That said, I believe OpenIndiana is still being maintained, but their release cycle is rather slow.
Oracleś got quite the history, but they have been supporting Linux and Java well and killing Solaris was a segue into Linux too, ergo more open.
To answer your question specifically, I'm used to "English (intl, with AltGr dead keys)" but in Linux Mint there are like 20 options. I was trying "US, intl, AltGr Unicode combining" or perhaps "US, intl, with dead keys" or such. (I've tried about a dozen in the last 2 days.) Instead of an apostrophe, they were generating what could become an accent mark, a stress mark or diacritic depending on the next letter. On "with AltGr dead keys" you must use right alt+apostrophe for that effect. (The quotation marks would do the same thing.)
Anyway, the keyboard lets me type things like þðßáœßðfhëü´6´^¨¼²³¤` with 2 buttons like shift to make a capital! This is good for German, Spanish and French, but Hungarian and Romanian require 3 buttons, then a 4th which is more tedious. left alt shift 5 = ş ţ romanian left alt shift 3 = ā lines for latin left alt shift 2 = ű ő - hungarian long umlaut
If you really want to learn about ways to enter writing systems, this is a wild ride: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_comp...
That they do some things you and I may agree with doesn't erase the terrible things that these companies do. Not just historically, but to this day.
They also very much care to create an open and competitive environment, that's why their reps repeatedly refused to sell us licenses to have Solaris run under VMWare ESXi, demanding we replace our ESXi deployments with... VirtualBox (no, really).
Caring about open source isn't about funding infinite options everywhere.
Also part of OpenSolaris was OpenZFS, used in many NAS systems worldwide. When they killed OpenSolaris the ZFS people also left Oracle.
Linux kernel is not entirety of Linux. Given that there is Oracle cloud and various hardware Oracle has to support, it will be almost unthinkable if Oracle did not contribute to Linux kernel.
But - I will be interested in Oracle's support for broader Linux ecosystem. How about contributions to GCC, Gnome (or any other DE as a matter of fact), Wayland/xorg etc? Oracle strictly contributes to projects from which it can benefit immediately.
Technically, yes, it is. "Linux" refers to the kernel, not to all of the other stuff you need on top of the kernel for a fully-formed OS. Although "Linux" is not used in that sense in the world at large anymore.
But this distinction is why you see some people mentioning that you should say "Gnu/Linux" and the like when referring to the OS as whole.
No, Linux is not always GNU.
They might have an occasional commit or two but clearly they can't stand behind their own promise of developing/supporting an EL distro the way Red hat does. I also don't see it changing tbh. I don't see troves of Open source engineers at Red Hat(or other companies) making a bee line for joining Oracle.
Anybody who watched what Oracle did to OpenSolaris after the Sun acquisition who does this might as well start planning for their alternate product launch right now because they're gonna need it when Oracle changes direction.
Back when I worked for Huawei, we regularly figured in the list of top contributors to the Linux kernel each cycle. I never got the impression that Huawei cares about open source. It was just a pragmatic, disinterested business decision.
Also, you shouldn't anthropomorphize Oracle.
Counterpoints:
* Oracle killed OpenSolaris.
* Oracle killed OpenOffice (after refusing to hand grant trademarks & related IP to the community until it was too late - well after LibreOffice replaced it on most distros, then dumped it on the Apache Project).
* Oracle killed Hudson (after refusing to hand grant trademarks & related IP to the community until it was too late - well after Jenkins had replaced it on the market, then dumped it on the Apache Project).
* Oracle attempted to make case law such that APIs fall under copyright. Oracle appealed Google v. Oracle all the way up to SCOTUS. Since countless open source projects are re-implement proprietary APIs (e.g. S3 protocol, Wine/Proton), and adverse ruling would have been catastrophic.
https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/
Unless lines of code defines the contribution level… amazing…
Anyway, the discussion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32150138 is interesting.
And it's pretty wide open. They keep some things close to their vest, which is their prerogative, but even some of that stuff has been opening up over time as well.
It's not been a seamless transition, but it's not been awful either. Developers are managing.
It could have been far, far worse.
Well, other than ramming through modules and the --add-opens fiasco from Java 9.
Also 3 years ago, the guy in charge of a Oracle database we had (now migrated to MSSQL) accidentally downloaded the wrong Oracle database software from their portal. It turns out Oracle just lets you download any variant in their portal and then just send you legal demands for payment when you accidentally use a higher tier than you licensed. Something they can absolutely fix themselves to prevent. Of course we told them to fuck off since we didn't use any feature specific to the other tier and deployed the correct variant.
If you download Enterprise Edition and use it to perform an upgrade from your SE2 database, then you will then be on the hook for the full $47,500/core.
There are two ways to undo this license change. a) Run "catdwgrd.sql" to get back to the SE2 release, then upgrade again with the correct license, or b) unload all of the data in the database (via exp/imp or data pump), then load it into a new database that is created with the correct license.
Staying on an EE database will certainly place you on the new pricing tier.
This is incorrect and actively misleading, because you are conflating 2 different things.
The Virtualbox Guest Additions are 100% FOSS and are included in many distros, including Ubuntu -- `apt install -y virtualbox-guest-x11` -- as well as being an optional extra with VirtualBox itself as an ISO file.
E.g. https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/7.0.8/VBoxGuestAd...
The Virtualbox Extension Pack is a proprietary optional extra.
https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/7.0.8/Oracle_VM_V...
There is no such thing as the "Guest Extensions".