[ftaghn]

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.

[jzb]

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.

[dralley]

> 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.

[chasil]

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

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

[dralley]

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.

[chasil]

Interesting, thank you for the correction.

I really remembered the BEA acquisition as the prior event.

[pjmlp]

And now we have JFR in OpenJDK thanks to it.