[wdaher]

I was trying to go for a "for linux nerds, by linux nerds" vibe, so I'm amused that your complaint is "This doesn't sound corporate enough".

At the end of the day, my view here is that Oracle has actually produced something useful, but lots of people are blind to it, in no small part because of what ultimately boils down to zealotry (which doesn't seem like an awesome reason to me). Hence the point of trying to get this out there.

[SwellJoe]

I assume you're on the Oracle Linux team? I'm sure you're sincere, and I'm sure the Oracle Linux team has many good folks working on it (likewise, the rest of Oracle). But, when you work within the belly of a beast, an absolute horror show of historic and ongoing wrongdoing, you have to expect pushback and mistrust from the Open Source community.

Oracle is a corporate sociopath. If you wish to label me a zealot for expecting ethics from the people and companies I work with, that's fine. But, it's not going to alter the reality that I am not alone. Many people mistrust Oracle, and just because one unit within Oracle seems to be trying to do right, it doesn't alter the fundamental nature of that creature. It'd be easier to overlook past misdeeds if Oracle was not currently behaving in unethical ways on a massive scale, and attacking Open Source on several fronts.

Oracle cannot have it both ways. It cannot wage war against Open Source and software freedom, and expect the Open Source community to just look the other way and choose Oracle products. At least, I sure as hell won't be looking the other way.

[skorgu]

Look, with all due respect we're not blind to it. I'm sure Oracle Linux is a fine piece of software, I bet it's just as good as RHEL and I'll even spot you that your support team is equally good as Red Hat's. We do not have technical objections to the work you've done.

We simply don't trust your employer to behave with anything even approaching good faith in any interaction. What happened to Solaris alone is a huge warning flag, those of us who have interacted with Oracle in a professional capacity have...more reasons to believe this.

[gaius]

What has happened to Solaris?

[SwellJoe]

Oracle.

[gaius]

So, FUD then.

[SwellJoe]

No, not FUD...not really. Solaris is a complicated tale.

The short explanation is that when Oracle acquired Sun, all of the hopes and dreams of Solaris users, particularly OpenSolaris users, were dashed. Many great technologies were pushed onto the back burner. All of Sun's Open Source portfolio saw a massive shake up and very little came out the other side healthier. Pre-acquisition, Solaris/OpenSolaris was a reasonable OS choice for new server deployments, particularly in cloud environments. Post-acquisition, you'd have to be a little bit nuts to deploy Solaris. Solaris has a lot of die-hard fans, with good reason...so this was a bitter pill to swallow for a lot of folks.

Oracle is simply ham-fisted when it comes to dealing with Open Source technologies that it comes into possession of. It's a really good example of a company that doesn't "get" Open Source. It's not limited to Solaris, Solaris is just one of the most popular, and the most difficult to replace for people who are relying on it.

[gaius]

I am a long-term SunOS/Solaris user (~20 years) and what killed Solaris is they neglected Solx86 for years for fear of cannibalizing SPARC sales. What happened was devs got Linux boxes to replace SPARCstations (using them as cheap X servers) then x86 and x64 got good enough for servers, and everyone ditched Solaris in order to get onto the commodity hardware (Linux wasn't really a factor in this decision, it just happened to be the dominant Unix on that hardware at the time, could easily have been FreeBSD). Thanks to Microsoft and their NT pretensions, supporting hardware vendors (e.g. storage) were manufacturing compatible kit too. It didn't help that Sun managed to forget that they were a business, and a hardware business at that. Giving stuff away to drive sales is a proven strategy, but no-one was buying SPARCs. Turns out it was cheaper to buy PCs and accept failures and workaround them, than to buy a "real" server that wouldn't fail and if it did, you could hot-swap anything. Call it the Google method.

Sun could have had a compelling desktop-to-datacentre story, all Solaris, on Intel PCs all the way to SPARC near-mainframes. But they succumbed to short term thinking and killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. The alternative to the Oracle acquisition was for them to go the way of SGI...

[davidmr]

I'm trying very hard to be as neutral as possible (as opposed to "Oracle bad. Raaaaar!"), but I've been part of the HPC community for a long time, and Oracle has done their best to tell us that we don't matter at all to them (Grid Engine, Lustre, etc.). I understand that the margins on HPC aren't great, so I don't necessarily fault them, but it leaves a very bad taste. That's just one community of many who feel like they've been wronged by Oracle.

You say that they've produced something useful; can you say a little more about what Oracle has specifically produced with respect to Oracle Linux? My strong impression is that they've taken 99.9% Red Hat's hard work, dumped their own 0.1% on top (OCFS2, some IB enhancements, etc.), slapped a big price tag on it and then exclaim, "look what we made!"

Removing that price tag doesn't change much. I'm open to being reasoned with, though, so please tell me why I'm wrong.

[wdaher]

There's a ton to talk about in the "Why Oracle Linux and not RHEL" department, but I'm not trying to sell you anything, so I want to set that aside for now. (I have to say, though, even the "big price tag" is significantly smaller than RHEL's).

Instead, I want to look at the following case: you're a sysadmin running CentOS. You don't pay anyone for support, and you have no intention of ever doing so.

There, I think the benefits are, in brief, the things you're able to achieve when you have large-scale resources: timely releases and better QA, while maintaining 100% RHEL compatibility. Basically "what you love about CentOS", minus "what you hate about CentOS".

But yes, it comes from Oracle :)

[cinch]

I dont get why your QA is better than red hats. They have a much longer experience with their product.

[praxulus]

It's cheaper.

[chris_wot]

Not following. Their QA is cheaper so it must be better?

[praxulus]

Assuming their QA is good enough for most customers, being cheaper is a pretty obvious benefit.

[Spearchucker]

Useful it may be, but after more than 10 years of having to work with Oracle products and consultants, the first thing that jumped at me was

...doesn't Oracle Linux cost money? A: Oracle Linux support costs money

That "support" word, right there, is the thing that makes me stay as far from Oracle as I can. It's like "Dude, here's the software. Have it, it's cheap/free." When things go wrong you get stung for exorbitant support/consulting fees, because, hey, you're tied in. With nowhere to go.

Sadly, too many organisations still go by the mantra of "The answer is Oracle. Now, what's the question?". That's no basis for a business case.

And yes, this is a rant, and I do have an axe to grind. I'm sorry if that offends (not my intent).

[wdaher]

I'm totally with you on fear of lockin, but for what it's worth, this particular case is basically the opposite of lock-in.

You can, at any time, switch away to CentOS, Scientific Linux, or Red Hat (if you're willing to write the check) and not have to totally reinvent your stack from scratch, since they're all binary-compatible.

[moe]

Then why mess with Oracle to begin with?

There are so many mature linux distros to choose from and plenty have trustworthy, battle-tested, commercial support-options if that's what you need.

I can't come up with a plausible reason why anyone would even consider Oracle.

[joshAg]

Because "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".

[taligent]

Because if it is more secure and offers more functionality than CentOS then why wouldn't I consider it ?

[rytis]

I can only see centos2ol.sh on that page. Was looking really hard, but failed to notice ol2centos.sh anywhere...

Oh, I need to write my own? Or will Oracle help me? For free?

[wdaher]

'--reverse' is on my wishlist as well, and I want to see it implemented, if nothing else because it makes the whole situation less scary-looking.

[gaius]

Uhh, you know RHEL costs money too? A lot of money.

[greedo]

If you're using Oracle, the cost of RHEL is a trivial factor.

[pgeorgi]

Not zealotry: bad experience.

Your plug for faster updates, for example: Security updates for Solaris used to be free.

So while I know that Oracle is large enough to host many different philosophies in many different departments, what Oracle has done to the former Sun departments really makes me wary of trusting any free offers by Oracle.

[peterwwillis]

Exactly right. I know of several mid- and large-scale companies that replaced (or are replacing) all of their Sun Solaris infrastructure as soon as they heard Oracle acquired them, because of their bad experiences with Oracle.

And from a technical perspective, if the OS is managed anything like the database or client tools, I wouldn't touch it with a 1000ft pole.

[runjake]

I think you did a good job with the vibe, although it was somewhat odd-feeling coming from an oracle.com site.

It did make me double-check the URL bar with the "If you find yourself needing to buy support, have fun reinstalling your system with RHEL before anyone will talk to you". But is perfectly valid.

The problem with Oracle Linux is that it's from Oracle. And I just don't trust them at all. I know I can revert back to CentOS or SL or whatever, but that's a pain. Trust is the problem.

You have a steep hill to hike, but it sounds like you may be cut out to take that on.

[rogerbinns]

> ... I can revert back to CentOS or SL ...

It looks like this script is one way as well. Joel provided good advice ages ago - make sure people can switch away again: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html

[GlennS]

I agree, I didn't see anything wrong with the press release. The negative comments here are based on Oracle's long-term reputation. In the wake of the Sun acquisition, they've publicly mismanaged (Hudson) or outright destroyed (OpenSolaris) open-source communities.

I think it's going to take a lot of work for Oracle brand to gain any trust in the eyes of Linux nerds.

[notatoad]

You did a good job of the "for linux nerds, by linux nerds" thing. However, when you work for Oracle writing as a linux nerd just comes off as insincere. Your employer is actively working to hurt the linux community, and your continued employment implies your consent of their actions. Your target market needs to be other evil companies that don't care what Oracle does in the courtroom, not linux nerds. "Our product is good" is not a sales pitch that matters right now, because we don't care about your product. It may technologically be the best product for my use case, but that is irrelevant if i don't trust the company behind it. You can call it zealotry if you want, i call it trust and pragmatism. I'm not going to build a business on top of a product that might be used next week as a tool to sue me or my friends. This was the only deciding factor when I chose Postgres over MySqL earlier this year for my company.

If you want to market to linux nerds, you need to change the perception of the company, because that's what matters most right now. Stop being evil, and then we'll give your products a chance.

[vtanase]

In all honesty I can understand where you're coming from. However, there is a discrepancy as far as I'm concerned between what you're selling and how you're selling it. In this case you are trying to sell quicker updates, better stability and performance to mostly enterprise customers, with a "we all like to geek around on linux" attitude. If you were trying to sell me on using Oracle Linux for my own development PC the tone would have been quite fine, but for your target audience it seems slightly out of place.

Furthermore, if you are indeed correct and Oracle Linux is something useful that a lot of people will benefit from I seriously doubt that zealotry will stand in the way of its adoption. I guess we will have to wait and see.

[wdaher]

Honestly, my target audience with this page is precisely Linux enthusiasts.

Presumably the enterprise customers are all either running RHEL or are already buying Oracle Linux support contracts, and wouldn't be interested in "Oh, I could just run this CentOS-like thing for free".

[rch]

So, my question is: What's the story on ZFS and DTrace?

I realize I could answer my own question with a little searching, but the main reason I would consider an Oracle branded Linux distribution would be for a reasonably 'official' way of getting some of what made Open Solaris compelling. Whatever the story is, I think my curiosity is predictable and common enough to warrant a mention in your article.

I should note that I am completely uninformed, and only have a passing interest in these things. What little I know is second-hand and years out of date. Although I just did just do a 'sudo yum search zfs' on RHEL 6, which is the only search I should need.

[wdaher]

My understanding is: There's a DTrace beta for Linux. There are no plans to port ZFS to Linux (but, Oracle is investing a lot in making btrfs kick ass).

[1] https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/entry/dtrace_for_oracle_linux... [2] https://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=234227...

[rch]

I'm not looking for a 'kick ass' file system... ZFS does have some features I am interested in though, and I would appreciate having it made available to me somehow.

I was going to leave you alone about the 'messaging' aspects of your post, but now I'll point out that your reply exhibits a similar tone.

[danbee]

The ZFS on Linux release candidates are pretty solid, http://zfsonlinux.org/

[wickedchicken]

The press release has a very us-vs-them mentality that I have seen about 0% other distributions do.

[cmkrnl]

How did it come to this? I mean, did it require lobbying to achieve this, or was it sunshine and rainbows all the way?

For my part, I think this is a good effort.

[ascendant]

Or pragmatism borne out of watching Oracle be a slimy, evil steaming pile of douchebaggery that has only been recently surpassed by Apple in the corporate warmongering department. It's like CentOS, with a heaping helping of evil in every bite.