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Comment by loph | Hacker News Reader

Simply put, I'm not using anything with 0racle's name on it.

Free software from 0racle? There are gonna be strings attached... to lawyers.

As much as people may hate oracle, they employ significant contributors to the Linux kernel. https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/

Many in very important subsystems. The XFS maintainer (who just recently stepped down from this role) and contributor Darrick Wong works for Oracle. Meanwhile, btrfs is the creation of Chris Mason, who worked there until 2012. Modern filesystems on linux owe a decent debt to Oracle. Good luck running an Oracle-free linux.

I often find it interesting when people imply the company is freeloading for having chosen the path of making an RHEL clone. They cloned RHEL because an unhealthy, dependent ecosystem was built around the one, singular linux distribution, not because they are unwilling to fund work.

Giving some serious competition to Red Hat can only be a good thing.

> They cloned RHEL because an unhealthy, dependent ecosystem was built around the one, singular linux distribution, not because they are unwilling to fund work.

They cloned RHEL to spite Red Hat for the JBoss acquisition in the mid-2000s.

...because Oracle themselves had bought BEA Systems, owner of Weblogic. JBoss was a competitor to Weblogic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BEA_Systems

Your timeline is wrong. JBoss was acquired by Red Hat in 2006, then Oracle Linux was announced a few months later also in 2006, then Oracle bought BEA Systems in 2007.

Oracle and Red Hat both entered the bidding for JBoss and Red Hat ended up winning. Larry Ellison took this very poorly.

Interesting, thank you for the correction.

I really remembered the BEA acquisition as the prior event.

And now we have JFR in OpenJDK thanks to it.

Competition is great. Xeroxing the code and undercutting them isn’t actually competing.

Oracle went after Red Hat when Red Hat bought JBoss. Larry said as much. They didn’t like Red Hat actually competing with them, so Oracle sought to undermine RHEL & have a full stack so they didn’t have to share customer spends.

Oracle Linux, surprisingly, is no strings attached. The licensing is straightforward GPL, the download pages are freely accessible.

In this case, it might be Oracle's lawyers preventing them from being aggressive, because they wouldn't fare well trying to challenge Red Hat. If they screw up their treading-lightly strategy, or if they get into legal trouble, there could no longer be a suitable operating system to run Oracle Database on.

It's because they are the underdog, in no position to impose anything. They do the work because they need it for strategic reasons, so they might as well give it away for goodwill.

Well, it's not because they are the underdog.

They need to give it away for those same strategic reasons that they created it.

Including everything that depends on Java in some form or function?

Hopefully that OpenELA uses MariaDB and not MySQL.

My guess is that Oracle Linux will use OpenELA source code repositories to create a distribution that has the usual Oracle-specific quirks, whereas RockyLinux and SUSE will use these repositories to create a distribution that has Red Hat-specific quirks. Sounds like members will have the freedom to do whatever they want with their distribution, they probably won't let any one member exclude specific packaging repositories that are desired by other members.

How is IBM better than Oracle?

IBM hasn't tried to establish that APIs are copyrightable; Oracle has.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....

The part about IBM in this blog post did change my opinion a bit: https://www.lpi.org/blog/2023/07/30/ibm-red-hat-and-free-sof...

How does the modern web browse itself without JavaScript? Oracle still has the trademark on that.

Are you tying to make 0racle the new Micro$oft/M$? Whats the zero supposed to represent?

My contempt is so great I will not even type their name.

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