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Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

It would be quite refreshing if we could have a story in which Oracle are the good guys for once.

I'm sure they are at least purchasing some modern-day 'indulgences' by - for instance - donating food to starving north korean elites?

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If Oracle ever wants to be the good guys just once, I have an idea for them that's right in their wheelhouse. Step 1: buy grsecurity's kernel hardening patches. Step 2: put said patches in the publicly released UEK source. Step 3: wait for grsecurity to refuse to give them future patches. Step 4: sue grsecurity for imposing further restrictions on the exercise of rights granted by the GPL.

I think the weakness of your model is just because you have the right to distribute a certain patch level that does not mean you automatically have the right to distribute further patches,

Conversely, If the right to distribute is revoked, say a GPL to closed source license change you have still the right to distribute any versions originally distributed under the open license.

A good example off all this is the sordid history of the berkely db.

Exactly right - you can get the GPL source for v1.0 which you've bought and paid for access to the binaries, but there's nothing that says they have to sell you binaries for v1.1, and thus you don't have any right to v1.1's source, despite it being GPL.

Matthew Ruffell was keeping the last open grsecurity patchset alive as part of Dapper Linux, but it's stuck on 4.9 and never managed to get a bootable 4.13 port.

Another good thing Oracle could do, is to release a CDDL update that is GPL-compatible.

They try to be the good guy. Their free tier is quite extensive (24GB of RAM, 4 ARM vCPUs and ±2 AMD cores, a several hundred GB of storage), good enough to run quite a decent personal cluster on, probably to lure in businesses for their AWS-style cloud services which are as ridiculously expensive as their competition.

However, just like AWS, Azure, and GCloud, their admin UI is complicated, slow, frustrating and full of invented acronyms and quirks.

I've read various stories over the years about Oracle extremely aggressively pushing high bills because they think you're using the "free" version of MySQL or VirtualBox in a way that you're supposed to pay for it. I'd be very wary running anything "free" from Oracle (as in: I wouldn't).

I had the same worries, but my Oracle account literally can't access any paid services. In fact, it's so bad that when your trial expires (you get some tryout credit) I couldn't even pay to continue operating if I wanted to, the resources had to be recreated from scratch!

I wasn't sure if you were joking, so I googled "oracle north korea". This is the first result:

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2020/10/07/North-Kor...

It's a strange feeling to find myself agreeing with the North Korean government.

Oracle Virtualbox is pretty good, and free for personal use. They also make patches available for their Oracle Linux kernel - the UEK, and in a better format than RedHat.

They are aggressive about the "personal use" thing. I used to work for an ISP. Apparently our customers would download Virtualbox, Oracle would pull the IPs out of their logs, find us, and then email us and ask us to buy a license. (More threatening than asking nicely, IIRC.) We informed them that we're an ISP and those IP addresses are our customers', not our office. And no, we didn't give them the contact information of our customers.

I wonder how many of their sales reps have gone after Spectrum and Comcast since the whole work from home thing started.

Do not make the mistake to anthropomorphize them...

They've done a lot of good stuff with Java.

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