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Comment by maratd | Hacker News Reader

> Why didn't they just offer paid support for CentOS? Why not dedicate full time engineers and donate?

Ah! I think you nailed it. A key part of what makes open source work is corporations putting guys on projects, donating code, and being part of the ecosystem.

Oracle doesn't want to be a part of the ecosystem. They want to be the ecosystem. They don't contribute to projects. They either purchase them outright if they can or start their own.

Technically, that's still open source. It's just seriously anti-social open source.

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Can't tell you how many time government and military refused to pay less for our product running on CentOS and instead wanted to pay lots more for a Redhat license so they can have support. Nevermind that once setup they only have to do yum update to get the latest security patches and not much else.

There are some companies that offer CentOS support but they are not as prominent perhaps. I think Oracle should have done that, and in the process win some brownie points with the OS community.

From their point of view pissing off some idealistic OS nerds wearing T-shirts and flip-flops is nothing to worry about. However, the problem is a lot of these nerds end up making technology choices, directly or indirectly by advising their managers what is better, etc.

The government (at least in the US) prefers RHEL more for consistency and accountability than anything. RHEL also has Red Hat standing behind it, which, for security, is important (as a read through the entire CentOS codebase would be cost-prohibitive).

Ironically, as a t-shirt/flip-flop nerd myself, I was hoping that this would be something that would appeal to nerds, rather than pissing them off: "Hey, Oracle is giving me this thing that sounds useful for free".

The product itself is appealing. The issue is the company behind it.

I don't disagree with anyone that is wary of Oracles motivation with this product. I also don't disagree that the product itself is nice. But given Oracles known interactions and history with open source an attitude of "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me" isn't unwarranted.

> Hey, Oracle is giving me this thing that sounds useful for free

We already have that, it is called CentOS. If giving something for free means trying to trample another open source project, then 'No Thanks, I think I'll pass'.

Even if that other project is better?

I don't think Android's developers should feel super duper sad that they killed Meego's chances of rising from obscurity.

Not sure how to measure "better" in this case. Better for RHEL clones usually means "less changes" than other clones and close to upstream. I guess "better" is support and speed of updates. So in case of a software project you can usually just look at the features and say "oh, look, can see how they added a,b,c and now it is exactly what I want" This is a cloning project, so the best feature is how closely it tracks upstream. But one can't know that unless one switches to it first, and I am guessing, there is enough antagonism in the community that many will not make that first step.

Sure, and I agree, but that's not what you said.

Nokia killed Meego. IF anything Windows Phone killed Meego.

Yeah, the first one's always free...

HN has a strong built-in bias against Oracle, largely due to its litigious bent, just so you know.

Not only due to the litigious bent. Many past events left a bitter taste - the management of the MySQL products, the end of OpenSolaris (which was a very good Unix distro - and one that lives on) and so on.

This can be interpreted as an attempt to suck the air out of CentOS and Red Hat at the same time. Considering Oracle's past, the hypothesis cannot be ruled out easily.

And don't forget the Hudson fiasco! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenkins_(software))

Yeah, litigation is by no means the only reason. It's just one of the clearest expressions of their relatively shitty corporate mindset.

Not to mention their bloody awful support.

As someone who has seen too many arguments about drivers between Dell & Redhat and between HP & Redhat let me just say that Redhat does a lot more than "just give you the latest security patches".

That's interesting. The company that I work for (which is known for a poor reputation in some tech circles) just hired developer to work on CentOS fulltime as an effort to contribute back to the project and the ecosystem.

We use CentOS on basically all of our Linux servers, so it seems appropriate to support the project financially.

Paid support may tie your hands too. Nokia used Red Hat Enterprise Linux and found a bug in its network stack. Patching it themselves would have invalidated their RHEL support contract. Instead, they had to listen customer complains for another 6 months before official RHEL patch arrived.

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