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Oracle Linux Adopters Suffer Backlash
atbarboz writes "One of the first converts to Oracle's support for Linux said it has endured a public backlash since its decision to drop Red Hat. 'Melbourne company Opes Prime Stockbroking told ZDNet Australia that in the weeks following its announcement to adopt Oracle Linux, upset Linux enthusiasts phoned, e-mailed and wrote about the company online to complain at the decision. "People called us out of the blue to tell us we were idiots," said Opes executive director Anthony Blumberg.'"
Seriously, this is what gives Linux a bad reputation. To take time out of your day to harass a company for changing Linux support/distro is just insane. People wonder why getting companies to switch to LInux is so hard? It's this crazy rep that Linux has of being filled with "maverick/crazy" users. Way to go guys in further perpetuating a negative Linux stereotype. Thanks for helping get Linux accepted in the enterprise as a professional system(s).
Actually, they kind of do, they just don't go out of their way to help you do it. You can load OpenDarwin, and run a generic X environment on top, or if you're truly ambitious, X + SheepShaver and get an OS-7 environment with Darwin underneath. You can (allegedly) replace Explorer in Windows with *whatever*, and still run the core Windows OS under your chosen user environment.
If you do either, almost none of your applications will still work, hence why it's not a real popular activity, but the underlying OS is still distinct from the operating environment.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Oracle IS the problem. It would've been nice if the poster(one who posts) or the article had explanied that while this is childish, there's more to it than first appears.
Red Hat is huge for a Linux distro but has nowhere near Oracle's $$. Microsoft, who Red Hat directly competes with, has more $$ than anyone.
Now Oracle decides to compete with...Linux(?!)
Fine, they should because the competition will only make the community stronger. Except maybe they should've put some work into developing a distro. They didn't. It's directly copied from Red Hat, Eillison admitted as such before it even happened. So there's no coopetition, they're rebranding Red Hat "Unbreakable"!
Unbreakable until they put Red Hat out of business. Then it would be pretty broken.
This would not normally be a weakness of the OSS business model, except Oracle is "undercutting" Red Hat intentionally, which they can afford to do for now. Some have suggested it's typical Ellison extracting vengeance for RH buying, I believe it was JBoss, out from under them.
Full disclosure; I'm typing this in Firefox, running on Fedora Core 6, an OS Red Hat gave me for free.
I don't tolerate it, I honestly like it.
If I ever need Linux support I'll likely purchase it from them, even at a premium. I hope I never have needs that might tempt me away from MySQL as Oracle won't be in the running.
and I'm genTOO busy to use a distro that eats all my time. (It's a terrible pun but i WANT you to flame me!)
You should try a more mainstream distro again. They've anticipated this need, so you don't need to rebuild anything. RedHat-based systems (and I believe SuSE and Debian/Ubuntu as well) all have a build system which extracts debugging symbols from binaries, placing them in -debuginfo packages along with the source code. gdb has been modified to look for debugging info in this location. You can run gstack on a coredump, realize you don't have the right debugging symbols, do a yum install foo-debuginfo, run it again, and get the right information. (And even have list do the right thing.) You can audit exactly how much disk space these packages use with a simple du -sk /usr/lib/debug and remove them without rebuilding. There's more information on the Fedora wiki.
CFLAGS customization makes Gentoo users (particularly ricers) feel superior, but in practice, I don't see any advantages. (I've never seen a situation where it made a worthwhile performance boost. There was an interesting thread about this on pgsql-performance a while back.) One major disadvantage is obvious: long compile times. A couple less so: it's harder to reproduce bugs affected by compiler options, and you need a separate scheme for updating systems which can't do the compile themselves.
I used to recompile the kernel with flags for my hardware. Now the system has been modularized, so unless I'm writing kernel code myself, I just use the RedHat vendor kernel which has been extensively QAed. In time, the same thing will happen to userspace binaries with optional dependencies: instead of detecting at configure time that I have support therefore modifying the base package's code, we'll move toward add-in modules that get dlload()ed in to provide the external functional that dependencies are needed for.
RedHat makes a good system, and they make contributions that benefit everyone. That you don't know anyone fanatical about it is not surprising. You're a Gentoo guy who hasn't used any other system in a while, so your sample's pretty skewed. And it's rare for people to get fanatical about the dominant system, particularly people who have an irrational fear of companies with working business models.