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Comment by throwaway_62022 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway_62022

> Oracle does care about open source, to the extent that they have been the top Linux kernel contributor several times.

Linux kernel is not entirety of Linux. Given that there is Oracle cloud and various hardware Oracle has to support, it will be almost unthinkable if Oracle did not contribute to Linux kernel.

But - I will be interested in Oracle's support for broader Linux ecosystem. How about contributions to GCC, Gnome (or any other DE as a matter of fact), Wayland/xorg etc? Oracle strictly contributes to projects from which it can benefit immediately.

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> Linux kernel is not entirety of Linux.

Technically, yes, it is. "Linux" refers to the kernel, not to all of the other stuff you need on top of the kernel for a fully-formed OS. Although "Linux" is not used in that sense in the world at large anymore.

But this distinction is why you see some people mentioning that you should say "Gnu/Linux" and the like when referring to the OS as whole.

You are "not even wrong", but that's all

There are more users of Bionic Linux libc than there are of GNU glibc.

No, Linux is not always GNU.

And that is a non sequitur

Linux is the kernel. Let’s not ignore Mr. Stallman’s contributions to open source software.

I will say that Oracle does contribute to gcc, gdb, and other parts of the GNU tool chain. I interviewed a few years ago with the team that does it. I don’t know how large the contributions are, but they seem super passionate about what they do and believe strongly in giving back

I tried to find some Oracle contributions to gcc and I could find none. See gtk contributors - https://puri.sm/posts/proud-to-be-top-contributor-to-gtk4/ and being a RHEL clone, they actually ship this stuff by default.

They might have an occasional commit or two but clearly they can't stand behind their own promise of developing/supporting an EL distro the way Red hat does. I also don't see it changing tbh. I don't see troves of Open source engineers at Red Hat(or other companies) making a bee line for joining Oracle.

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