Comment by chasil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chasil | Hacker News Reader

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Oracle does maintain Solaris, which would seem to me to entail a much larger support burden than Red Hat's stewardship of their enterprise Linux distribution.

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.

> Oracle does maintain Solaris, which would seem to me to entail a much larger support burden than Red Hat's stewardship of their enterprise Linux distribution.

This seems like a non-sequitur in a conversation about open-source OSes.

I do not understand how, as Solaris was open previous to Oracle's acquisition.

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.

> Red Hat does not maintain all of the code in RHEL - they repackage and patch everything taken from other developers.

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.

> Oracle does maintain Solaris, which would seem to me to entail a much larger support burden than Red Hat's stewardship of their enterprise Linux distribution.

Solaris was effectively killed off in 2017 when Oracle laid off most people working on it. And Open Solaris is dead too.

Illumos also effectively died when most of their corporate support switched to Linux. Had nothing to do with Oracle.

That said, I believe OpenIndiana is still being maintained, but their release cycle is rather slow.

Rumours of our death are, as ever, greatly exaggerated. We continue to maintain the core OS facilities provided by illumos and the organisations behind distributions like SmartOS and OmniOS continue to ship maintained, supported software to a mixture of community and commercial users.

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