[Beowulf] [External] Re: Your thoughts on the latest RHEL drama?

[Prentice Bisbal]

On 6/28/23 5:45 PM, Ryan Novosielski wrote:

>> On Jun 28, 2023, at 17:25, Prentice Bisbal via Beowulf 
>> <beowulf at beowulf.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 6/27/23 11:59 AM, Chris Samuel wrote:
>>> On 26/6/23 11:38, Joe Landman wrote:
>>>
>>>> This was likely aimed at the other folks like Oracle who are making 
>>>> money off of rebuilds and not so much at Alma/Rocky.  Those are 
>>>> collateral damage.
>>>
>>> From memory (insert sirens, klaxons and other warnings sounds here) 
>>> Oracle was the target for Red Hat's obfuscating of their kernel 
>>> sources to make it harder for them to do their kernel variants.
>>>
>>> It would horribly ironic if this move pushed more people towards 
>>> using OL given Oracle seem to give that away for free. :-/
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetic_justice
>>
>> This could the point where the OL forks from RHEL even moreso. 
>> Considering that many corporations are already spending $$$ for 
>> Oracle, and Oracle has the resources to do the same dev work that 
>> they were "letting" RH do, I think Oracle could certainly challenge 
>> RHEL for corporate dominance if they wanted to. Of course, none of 
>> that affects us since most of us are using the free rebuilds, but it 
>> would be funny to watch from the sidelines.
>
> Oracle is the one organization that I can think of that has been worse 
> than the recent track record of whatever has been going on at 
> IBM/RedHat. They basically priced themselves completely out of 
> academia vis-a-vis all of the former Sun properties.

I'm in no position to dispute that - I've never had to pay for Oracle 
products, and haven't dealt with any Sun systems since around 2000. They 
have been giving away Oracle Unbreakable Linux and VirtualBox completely 
free for years now, and while I haven't tested all the desktop 
virtualization solutions available, I've found VirtualBox to be far 
superior to VMware workstation for my current situation of needed to run 
Linux guests on Windows host (please don't ask!)

I highly doubt Oracle would ever do what I proposed, but I think they 
have the resource to do it. Of course, since they'd have to spend more 
work to maintain their Linux distro, they may decide they need to make 
money to support that larger effort, completing the circle. ;)

--
Prentice
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