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Comment by tsjq | Hacker News Reader

>Under Red Hat, the project was directed by an independent governing board and many of CentOS's head developers were Red Hat employees, working apart from RHEL developers as part of the company's open source and standards team. As part of the agreement, Red Hat took possession of CentOS's trademarks.

Embrace

>CentOS itself was not actually providing that much usefulness to Red Hat

Extinguish

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Oracle appears anxious to "embrace" the CentOS community. Hopefully, the "extend" and "extinguish" are not on the agenda.

The old notice: https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/

New blog: https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/reasons-for-switching-centos-...

New repo conversion script, works with CentOS 8: https://github.com/oracle/centos2ol

Free updates available indefinitely. For those who desire paid support, there are several (yearly) price tiers ($119; $499; $1,199; $1,399; $2,299).

> Hopefully, the "extend" and "extinguish" are not on the agenda.

There are certain organisations whose prior behaviour precludes "hope" from a reasonable set of expectations. Whether or not Oracle is included is left as an exercise to the reader.

For the reader: Using no-cost Oracle software is playing with fire. Oracle is a machine build to extract license fees and, when necessary, to litigate.

He's not joking either. I did contracting work for hospitals, upgrading their infrastructure. Strictly backend network stuff -- routers, switches -- but got to sit in on all of the IT meetings.

Oracle asked them for license count and a core count of their environment. Newer IT guy sent them all of that info, asked for pricing for upgrades to a few newer Dell systems.

Oracle thought they were only using about 3/4 of the machines / cores / licenses they were billing them for, and promptly demanded the hospital group pay for the rest of their usage, as far back as they could prove. Lawyers got involved fast.

My work finished before it was resolved so I never got an exact answer but IIRC they paid something extra to Oracle.

Doesn't that seem reasonable though? Pay for the software you're using?

I don't see the problem, other than the hospital not keeping tabs on what they'd installed.

As a former Oracle employee I am assuredly biased. But here's my point of view: if Oracle tried to pull one of those moves, people would just jump ship to something else (just like they are doing here in response to Red Hat/IBM). And likely Oracle management knows this, and so they likely won't.

Oracle Linux is very different from other Oracle products (e.g. database, ERP systems) in that there are quite low levels of lock-in / switching costs. "Embrace and extinguish" works best for products with high switching costs, which isn't Linux.

If you are particularly worried about this, just avoid using any of the features Oracle added to RHEL, like DTrace or Btrfs. Just stick to the RHCK (Red Hat Compatible Kernel) instead of UEK (Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel).

I tried this back in the RHEL 6 days. Do not recommend.

They changed things just enough that you can't just drop in RHEL and expect drivers, performance, and other kernel-level stuff to be the same. Now I understand why, it was to better support their database. But it was frustrating to deal with unless you were going all in with them and planned to pay them for systems that needed support.

Has this changed?

I ran the conversion long ago with Red Hat 4, and there were no problems. I've heard one report elsewhere of a smooth CentOS 8 conversion.

Oracle Linux 6 includes two kernels - the RHCK (Red Hat Compatible Kernel), and the UEK (Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel). Which one were you using?

I think Oracle only commits to userland compatibility with RHEL, but perhaps not kernel drivers under either distribution kernel.

That takes me back. Yes, we could not use the UEK so we tried using the RHCK. But we were still running into issues trying to debug kmods that we weren't running into on CentOS. I guess we weren't in the target market there for Oracle. It left me with a negative impression that maybe is unwarranted, but I've had plenty of other bones to pick with Oracle so I would be very cautious in depending on them for a platform.

See Java as an example. OpenJDK (and IBM/RHEL, ironically) is the only thing keeping that from turning into a bigger support trash fire.

I will tell you two things about RHCK compatibility.

First, Oracle's RHCK worked properly with the ZFS source code when I wrote this, and I'm assuming that it was built for Red Hat:

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/zfs-linux

Second, it would likely be possible to run the CentOS kernel on Oracle Linux. My research for Btrfs ran the other way, but I was able to get both the latest Fedora and Oracle UEK kernels working on CentOS with various levels of Btrfs support.

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/btrfs-centos-living-loo...

I don't think it's necessary to use an Oracle-supplied kernel package on Oracle linux; kernel packages from other distributions would likely work.

>> project was directed by an independent governing board

Of which the majority were / are RedHat employees so not really independent at all

How do you extinguish an open source project? Wasn't the idea that the community will keep it alive? Like the invisible hand of the free community?

Perhaps they got some ideas when they cozied up with Microsoft a while back...

How do you extinguish what someone else can fork? Your post sounds good, but one can not extinguish an open source project as you claim.

Good luck forking CentOS and maintaining it yourself, or even with a ragtag community team. You need a big team of full-time, compensated developers.

It is already extinguished, it is done.

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