I'm pleased to see that evil deeds have consequences, though I'd like to see Oracle suffer a little (OK, a lot) more before getting over the hump. People don't use Oracle Linux because the Open Source community doesn't trust Oracle (and they shouldn't; that mistrust has been well-earned over a couple of decades).<p>There's a lot of reasons not to use Oracle Linux, most of them non-technical. Oracle is simply not an ethical member of the Open Source community, and if you trust them, they will screw you, some day, some way. Red Hat may have their flaws, but they've never sued over patents and they've never attempted to destroy competing projects or companies through legal threats and bullying. CentOS may be slow to jump on updates sometimes and to get out new releases, but at least it's a good Open Source citizen.<p>As an aside, if you want a faster moving RHEL rebuild that has paid developers working on it, you might try Scientific Linux. It is built by CERN and Fermilab, and tends to be very solid and fast to update and invisible (i.e., I don't think about it, at all, and it Just Works). We switched from CentOS to SL back when CentOS 6 was so late being released; couldn't be happier with it. We added support in Virtualmin for SL for just that reason...so many of our customers wanted 6, it was worth the effort to add a new OS.<p>So, yeah, Oracle is gonna have to have a "come to Jesus" moment if they want to participate in the Open Source community. They've got a lot of repenting to do.
I've run 200+ server environments on centos4, a 40+ server cluster on centos5, and now run a 50+ server cluster on rhel6. I'm pretty much dead on their target audience here.<p>This seems almost mean. Its a billion dollar company calling out a volunteer group of a couple of guys for being slower than them.<p>Part of the reason I switched to rhel was exactly this graph, I didn't have a lot of faith in centos as a going concern given the delays on 6. But also, its clearly not easy for a reason. There is a lot of work to be done, and the farther you trace your way up the rhel/epel/fedora tree the more you realize this is a community providing an insane amount of value and deserves to be funded.<p>So if Oracle is going to sell me on using and/or paying for their distro, being faster than a handful of volunteers isn't gonna do it. Going toe-to-toe with redhat on funding, contributing, producing and supporting open source software such that I <i>want</i> to fund you is what'll do it.
Oh yeah! Please lock me in to your crappy Red Hat knock-off so you can screw me royally if Larry changes his mind and wants to extract some money from its users.<p>IMHO, Oracle is certainly the LAST company you should use any product from unless you are absolutlely forced to (like Java, unfortunately, or their bloated DB if your are in the financial industry). Once you are dependent on them, no matter if you are a partner or customer, they will definitely find a way to screw you over. If you want supported Red Hat linux, just buy it from Red Hat.<p>[UPDATE]: Also, how nice of the to mention Ksplice in the announcement as a quick reminder how they like to screw existing user bases of their products.
<i>Why are you doing this?<p>This is not some gimmick to get you running Oracle Linux so that you buy support from us. If you're perfectly happy running without a support contract, so are we. We're delighted that you're running Oracle Linux instead of something else.<p>At the end of the day, we're proud of the work we put into Oracle Linux. We think we have the most compelling Linux offering out there, and we want more people to experience it.</i><p>Hihihihi. Sure you are.
Thanks for the brtfs, but no thanks. I'll only touch your stuff with a GPL pole and with a non-oracle maintainer.<p>If you want support for Centos, please consider redhat *<p>I'm sure there are some good people at Oracle, and maybe this is a genuine project by some of them, but the hierarchy Oracle is under is just too fickle (as what happened with OpenSolaris).<p>*Not redhat affiliated. Not even running redhat or fedora anywhere. But on enough mailinglists to see that RH isn't a respected open-source company for nothing.
While Oracle doesn't have the trust of the open source world, the enterprise IT world does trust it (and Ksplice is pretty awesome, too!). This is likely to become an important distribution over time.<p>I've known companies that used CentOS for all the dev boxes and Redhat for production to save money. That has downsides because you are running different distros in the end (there can be subtle and not-so-subtle differences) and, if you have a problem on a non-prod box, your forced to use community support.<p>Oracle Linux will become a viable alternative here. Run the same distro on all boxes and only pay for production boxes. Then, if you have a problem on an unsupported box, you can bump it up to supported without altering the box.<p>The key here, for Oracle, is whether that support is actually worth paying for.
Oracle launches Oracle Linux -> People port over from CentOS -> CentOS community dies -> Oracle stops updating Oracle Linux for people without support contracts<p>I'd call anyone claiming this strategy a looney if it weren't for the fact that the company doing this is Oracle and I'd put nothing below them as far as a business strategy.
For the uninitiated, RedHat was so unhappy with Oracle repackaging/reselling a nearly identical system that they started obfuscating their patches:<p><a href="http://www.itworld.com/open-source/139165/red-hat-defends-kernel-code-obfuscation" rel="nofollow">http://www.itworld.com/open-source/139165/red-hat-defends-ke...</a><p><a href="http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Red-Hat-defends-changes-to-kernel-source-distribution-1202733.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Red-Hat-defends-chang...</a>
<a href="http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL6/3/base/i386/" rel="nofollow">http://public-yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL6/3/base/i38...</a><p>It took me some moments to realise that Oracle Linux 6.3 as a clone of RHEL will, of course, include <i>libreoffice</i> as the office package for the desktop installation as opposed to previous RHEL versions that included OpenOffice.org.<p>There is a degree irony in this, but I imagine the number of customers using Oracle Linux as a desktop OS is small. I gather a number of financial institutions do use CentOS on desktops and RHEL on servers however.
What a bullshit comparison.<p>They mean to replace RHEL (paid support) but try to win over CentOS customers (who surely won't pay for support, if they would want to, they would use RHEL and thus would have even faster security patches then Oracle Linux).<p>Stay away.. as far as possible.. thanks.
Readers please note this is the same 'Oracle Unbreakable Linux' they've been peddling for a while. If you can read that product name without feeling some sort of incredulation, this may the distro for you.
But, if I wanted a better alternative to CentOS, wouldn't I just go and use Red Hat? Why would I lock myself into a company that has this bad a track record?
Frankly, given how well they've managed every other FOSS element in their charge, I have no doubt that this is not only NOT a "better" alternative to CentOS (disclosure: I have no particular love for CentOS, but you do know what you are getting with them up front...your releases will be slow, a little far from bleeding edge, but deliberate and solid) and likely has some kind of business booby-trap attached.
I have Oracle Linux and RHEL servers. The support from Oracle does not meet our needs, or expectations. When I open a ticket with them, they respond via e-mail. I cannot respond to the e-mail. I have to go back to their website to update the ticket. 99% of the time I have resolved the problem myself. Some I just gave up on after a few weeks of not being able to talk to a human, or someone who has a clue. I tried to show them some of the older tickets that I was complaining to them about their service on, but their system had already deleted them which increased my ire. In fairness, someone once got back to me at about 2am, after their call center rolled over to Asia. This person actually knew what he was talking about, (Once I got past the accent). However, I always get MUUUUUCH better support from RH, and IBM-(AIX). I don't call often, but when I call, I need an answer, not "Web Ticketing System tag". If you are going to Oracle for their support, go to RH instead, or you will be sorry. I sure am.
Have they improved dtrace since this released abortion: <a href="http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2011/10/10/oel-this-is-not-dtrace/" rel="nofollow">http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2011/10/10/oel-this-is-not-dtrac...</a><p>update: <a href="http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2012/02/23/dtrace-oel-update/" rel="nofollow">http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2012/02/23/dtrace-oel-update/</a>
I'm not in the least a fan of Oracle, but I think this could still be a safe move for a free EL distribution.<p>It don't see a major drawback here:<p>- You get faster and more reliable updates, <i>especially</i> important for security updates.<p>- The release schedule will be more predictable (I know a lot of people moved to ScientificLinux while waiting for the CentOS6 release)<p>- It's binary compatible with RHEL (and therefor CentOS). Meaning, that you can drop the Oracle repos and move back if you don't like the behavior you're seeing upstream.
I "heard" oracle folks got help from "centos" folks to rebuild "all" packages from redhat. Some packages just wouldn't build on koji. centos folks reportedly helped them.<p>This is pure "evil"
The advantage of Oracle Linux that I see is the newer supported kernel version, On both Oracle Linux 5 and 6 you get 3.0, compared to 2.6.18 for RHEL5 and 2.6.32 for RHEL6.
Why all the vitriol towards Oracle?<p>Not that I care either way, I don't have any stake in the matter. I just don't have much experience with them outside of limited usage of Java.
This sprang instantly to mind.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog</a>
I know that 'hackers news' folks (Google employees?) don't like Oracle, the enterprise IT world does trust Oracle. They trust Oracle much more than they trusts Google (not hard).<p>From outside, neutral point of view, all these corporations Oracle, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. are equally "evil" - especially from point of view of Open Source community. Am I wrong here?
I don't know what to say....<p>On one hand, good for Oracle, this actually sounds like a good initiative. On the other hand, Oracle consistently gives us reasons to distrust them. Consequently, while I think this is a good effort, I certainly wouldn't install it. In fact, I somewhat suspect that I'd find a way to make A/UX work before I install Oracle Linux.....
haha, yeah switching to an Oracle-backed version of CentOS is going to be 'better'.<p>Better like Solaris? Needlessly different for it's own sake!<p>Hah, no thanks.
Regarding trust issues, I went from trusting the CentOS team (and defending them against some criticisms that turned out to be quite valid) to being kind of disgusted with them during the CentOS 6 fiasco. There are different kinds of trust and I really don't see either CentOS or Oracle Linux as a good risk.
Ksplice and a few other technical features could make this a technically better choice than RHEL (although I'd focus on adding security features beyond RHEL, which breaks some compatibility).
LOL!
So they took it against RHEL and failed, not they're picking on CentOS (and they will fail). This is just hilarious! Can Oracle get any more pathetic than this?