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Comment by weare138 | Hacker News Reader

But what stops Oracle from just pulling a Red Hat when people switch over to Oracle Linux? Oracle hasn't exactly proven itself to be trustworthy over the years and that's putting it lightly.

I think we need a fully open source alternative to RHEL not bound to any company. Something akin to the Debian project that can serve as an upstream reference distro and repository.

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Oracle Linux, Red Hat, and Debian are all “fully open source”. What you mean is “not maintained by a corporation.”

Well, RHEL is now only "fully open source" with quotes, and won't allow code redistribution anymore.

> I think we need a fully open source alternative to RHEL not bound to any company

I believe the problem is not that there wouldn’t be open source alternatives but that that’s not what enterprise wants. Enterprise wants a company behind the distribution.

Of course, think about the relationship between Ubuntu and Debian. The idea is the upstream would be a fully open-source project that vendors build off of downstream. This way we can prevent vendors from subjugating a distribution like with Red Hat and CentOS and if a vendor pulls out of the market or goes out of business it doesn't take down the ecosystem with it.

But arguably, there's also a pretty large world that wants enterprise type of solutions (for some use cases) without being actual enterprises.

Or am I the only one?

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