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Oracle takes aim at CentOSOracle takes aim at CentOSPosted Jul 19, 2012 5:48 UTC (Thu) by jamesmorris (subscriber, #82698)Parent article: Oracle takes aim at CentOS I'm obviously biased here (I work for Oracle), but I don't agree that community-oriented development is not, in general, among the company's greatest strengths There's an impressive list of community projects here: https://oss.oracle.com/ and Oracle is consistently cited in LWN's kernel development reports under "Most active employers". On that note, we are currently hiring Linux kernel developers with community experience, as well as core userland and virt developers, to work on mainline projects. Email me for details -- james.l.morris@oracle.com :-)
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Oracle takes aim at CentOS Posted Jul 19, 2012 12:07 UTC (Thu) by ras (subscriber, #33059) [Link]
This is the second post I've seen by an Oracle employee who doesn't "get it". The other on was on another forum. He was asked essentially the same question: "why not Oracle Linux? Especially now that errata are free to download?".
Look, I thought it was obvious, but ... open source isn't about money, and in particular isn't about "free" as it was used above. It's about trust. It is about everybody trusting to contribute to a shared commons.
You can not pull stunts like Oracle did with Open Office, or the events that ended up with the Apache Foundation resigning from the JCP Executive Committee, or Oracle suing Google over software patents, or even Oracle insisting API's are copyrighted and keep that trust thing. After all we have an understanding that no one involved in open source sues each over patents (hint: it's written into the GPLv3 and the EPL), and the commercial GPL ecosystem are built on the fact that you can't copyright API's, just the code you link to.
We know what built our movement. It wasn't money. It's not even about money. We are happy with the likes of RedHat, Ubuntu and Crossover charging us to for their products. It's about trust. And if Oracle wants to sell us open source products then that's fine, but first they have to earn our trust. Right now they seem hell bent on destroying it. Unlike Oracle we all know that once trust is lost, so is the community that is built upon it.
Oracle takes aim at CentOS Posted Jul 19, 2012 12:11 UTC (Thu) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link]
+5 (well said)
Oracle takes aim at CentOS Posted Jul 19, 2012 13:40 UTC (Thu) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]
Even if it is all about money— Attempting to submarine popular technology infrastructure as Oracle has done has endangered the livelyhoods of all IT professionals.
If they ultimately prevailed on the copyrightability of basic APIs there would be a lot less room for competition both in the software market and in the jobs-at-companies-integrating-sofware markets.
If oracle was interested in promoting their software and services they should have started by not engaging in litigation that left them in a deep hole in the eyes of many.
Oracle takes aim at CentOS Posted Jul 19, 2012 19:40 UTC (Thu) by sailorxyz (subscriber, #52650) [Link]
Absolutely, I cannot agree more. Since Oracle started it's current behavior I have been totally turned off. I used to use VirtualBox, now I prefer to pay for VmWare. I used to use MySql, now I use Postgre, and I've stopped using NetBeans as well.
Oracle has totally destroyed trust and I very much doubt that it will regain it anytime soon.
Oracle takes aim at CentOS Posted Jul 20, 2012 19:19 UTC (Fri) by alan (subscriber, #4018) [Link]
FWIW, while VirtualBox and MySQL are owned and branded as Oracle products, the relationship with the end user has not really changed.
Oracle takes aim at CentOS Posted Jul 20, 2012 20:54 UTC (Fri) by sailorxyz (subscriber, #52650) [Link]
That's the point, they are branded as Oracle products and so are tainted by association. And whats to stop Oracle doing with them whatever it may wish should it get the urge?
Oracle takes aim at CentOS Posted Jul 21, 2012 13:53 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The fact that they're free software and can be trivially forked? (As has, you know, *already been done* with Hudson.)
Oracle takes aim at CentOS Posted Jul 21, 2012 10:52 UTC (Sat) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
Things are changing fora the worst, though slowly. In order to use their bug tracker, you now have to sign up to the Oracle integrated web single sign on thingy, which insists on invading your privacy in order to find out the name of your employer, your job title, etc. It is a small but irritating deterrent to filing bugs against VirtualBox.
Oracle takes aim at CentOS Posted Jul 26, 2012 21:06 UTC (Thu) by philomath (guest, #84172) [Link]
+ UINTMAX_MAX
Oracle takes aim at CentOS Posted Jul 19, 2012 16:11 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
Oracle seems to do pretty well at contributing to open source projects, but not so well at running them. It looks to me like that list is: projects where Oracle is bound by someone else's license (e.g., btrfs), projects that nobody else is likely to contribute to (Oracle express), and projects that have forked over Oracle's mismanagement (with MySQL being the only case of Oracle's fork still being the most popular).
So I'd say that Oracle is, in fact, good at community-oriented development, but doesn't have a tendency toward being community-oriented.
Oracle takes aim at CentOS Posted Jul 20, 2012 15:20 UTC (Fri) by matik (subscriber, #62373) [Link]
MySQL community is also mistreated by Oracle with the introduction of a private bugtracker [1] and releasing security fixes without disclosing the actual vulnerabilities [2].
Oracle's urge of imposing control also caused Hudson community to fork it as Jenkins [3] I wonder if Oracle still has a chance to learn how to properly communicate with and benefit from the open source community.
[1] http://mysqlha.blogspot.com/2011/02/where-have-bugs-gone....
Oracle takes aim at CentOS Posted Jul 20, 2012 15:31 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
Yes, MySQL was in my group of projects that had forked over Oracle's treatment of the project. It was the exception only in that not everyone switched to MariaDB because of it.
Oracle takes aim at CentOS Posted Jul 21, 2012 21:49 UTC (Sat) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link]
To be fair, MySQL was not really ever run as a community project. It has always been a vendor proprietary database with an open source license. Sun paid a very large sum of money for it to continue to collect commercial license and support fees, and that is why Oracle maintains it today.
If anyone actually manages to use it without paying Oracle for licensing and support services, that serves no real purpose to them other than as a loss leader for future paying customers. If they allow unpaid customers to get timely updates and report bugs _at all_, those are much better terms than they offer with any of their conventional products.
There is a lesson to be learned here. Commercial vendors are naturally in the business to turn a profit. If the best way they see fit to do that is to make periodic open source code dumps of a internally developed code base, or supervise a community project where they hold all the cards, vendor lock-in is nearly as likely as with any other vendor proprietary product.
Freedom to fork is nice, but forking and maintaining something as complex as a relational database server certainly isn't a proposition to be undertaken lightly, even more so when the trademark of the original is hardcoded into the ABI. If you use MySQL you are married to its future as a commercial product. Divorce is not the most practical option.
Oracle takes aim at CentOS Posted Jul 19, 2012 18:48 UTC (Thu) by fw (subscriber, #26023) [Link]
This page lists open-source projects, not community projects. For instance, I repeatedly tried to get isolated fixes for Berkeley DB issues so that we can apply them in released Debian versions, but I was unsuccessful. (The Berkeley DB repositories are private, so self-service wasn't an option.)
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