Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Users who call up a company they have no relation to in order to tell them their tech decisions are bad are complete morons. Linux is an OS, not a religion. If a company wants to run Oracle Linux, Red Hat, BeOS, Windows ME, or Mac OS 7 is completely their choice to make.
It's idiocy like this that gives any advocacy a bad name.
Look, guys, going around irritating users by calling them idiots, who are really our customers and should be treated as such (whether commercial users or not) is the kind of thing that makes the Linux community look like a bunch of elitist snobs who shout things like 'RTFA' at every question.
Want to know one of the main stumbling blocks to further widespread adoption of Linux? If you're one of the people calling Opes a bunch of idiots, look in the mirror.
My blog
Another aspect I don't get in all of this is the preference for Red Hat over Oracle. Red Hat is a great company that has contributed a lot to Linux, but to be fair, they are also a company that does not provide free access to downloads of their signature product (which is why we have CentOS), and a company the CEO of which once stated that Windows was a superior alternative to Linux for desktop users (admittedly a few years ago). Oracle, on the other hand, makes Unbreakable Linux freely availible to anyone who wants to download it, and additionally, also gave a major boost to Linux when it started supporting Linux as a platform in the late 1990s.
To be clear, though, I am not saying that Oracle has a better record than Red Hat, rather, that the two have both made contributions to the Linux community, and for a large number of people to attack a company for using Unbreakable Linux as opposed to RHEL is, in my opinion, retarded.
How dare you not drink our koolaid!" /froth froth froth
We use Linux for a lot of things here where I work, but if we moved to some other OS, or some other comapny changed platforms, I wouldn't take it personally. I only care if they offer inferior service or compromise data, which is more a matter of ops.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
What on Earth does anyone think contacting some organisation (that they probably have no contact with in day to day life) to tell them that they're idiots is going to achieve? More to the point, if it's not a public sector organisation and the people calling aren't shareholders, what the hell business is it of theirs?
A common selling point of open source is "if you don't like the support, you have the freedom to go elsewhere". Reading between the lines of the article, it seems like Opes have done just that. So as soon as someone decides they don't like the support and they want to go elsewhere, this is what they get? One thing I'm sure of, it certainly isn't going to encourage anyone to adopt Red Hat.
I bet the reaction would be totally different if they moved to Oracle Linux from some other commercial Unix.
'who are really our customers'
Maybe they are your customers but my customers earn that classification by giving me some form of payment. Customers are someone you have an obligation to. Nobody has an obligation to these guys except Oracle.
Linus >= Jesus, therefore [insert convoluted defense for childish behavior here]. Mods, mod this insightful.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Deleted
Yeah, Microsoft users are much better ;)
There are zealots on both sides of the fence. Some of them have more sense than others.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Hang on for a second... I thought that one of the MAIN REASONS that Linux people push Linux so hard is because it avoids scary lock-in. Linux is Linux, right? Switching should be no big deal for customers, since there's no worry about lock-in using Linux... right? I honestly have no idea because every time I've tried Linux, I've never gotten it set up to the point of being functional.
I don't respond to AC's.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Near the end of TFA is the important reason for them to get their support from Oracle:
They're running Oracle's application server and database on some of the mission-critical servers.
With Oracle supporting both the application and the OS under it there's no time and money lost to finger-pointing when something gets hosed. Instead a single team buckles down and fixes it immediately.
(Presuming they ever need service. One of the comments from Red Hat indicates that they may never have actually had to USE the service contract. Take THAT, Microsoft! B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
How do we know it was Linux zelouts? RedHat? Microsoft?
I think you got it wrong. I read the post at the link you provided and this guy wasn't a zealot. He's *NOT* saying "contact companies that use Microsoft productsn and bash them". He said that he's tired of the zealots who bash Microsoft and their products and said "instead of complaining here in a forum that Microsoft doesn't monitor, contact Microsoft directly and complain there".
What he said actually makes a ton of sense. Go to the source of what you percieve to be the problem. It's just like when I tell my daughter "if you don't like what the government does, then do something about it. Vote, protest, write you congress people, write the president, run for office. Do something, don't just complain."
RedHat support is some of the worst support I've ever seen in the marketplace. Indeed, it is far worse than Microsoft's (which is pathetic). All the companies that I'm affiliated with use Suse if they want support nowadays. (and I HATE the patent deal that Novell did with Microsoft, but Redhat is so damn miserable at support, there isn't much of a choice).
Novell's support isn't great, but at least they call you back. I don't think I've ever gotten Redhat to call back on any support issue over the 4 years I was a customer. (The only reaction I've ever seen from their customer support is to quietly close my tickets that stayed open for more than a year -- without ever putting in an explanatory note or fixing the problem, of course)
If that company wants to go with Oracle so they can actually get real support, more power to them. They could switched to using Microsoft Windows. . . but they didn't - and for that I'm glad.
Surely if people feel strongly that something someone is doing is wrong they should be able to talk about it and protest about it?
There's a lot of talk here about "How dare they tell Opes that they're being idiots!" Like there's something wrong with making your opinion of something heard.
If people only took an interest in something that directly affected them, this world would be a far shallower place. Surely inconvience is a price to pay for the chance to say what you want to say? As far as I can see, no one's being a jackass - there's no direct impairment of the companys trade - people are simply calling them up and telling them they're idiots.
It's called freedom of expression.
You might want to check the definition of religious. (Also, you're an idiot.)
This way of thinking annoys me. It's possible to not believe in something without having any evidence. For example, if I told you that there was an alabaster dildo slowly orbiting our solar system out in the Oort cloud, it would be impossible for you to prove otherwise, given that we lack the necessary technology to zero in on an object that small and that far away. However, it would be reasonable for you to not believe me. I think you can agree that your refusal to believe in the alabaster dildo does not constitute a religion, even though you are technically believing something without having any irrefutable evidence for that belief.
To take this one step further: what if, sometime in the future, our technology improved to the point where we could test the alabaster dildo hypothesis, and, lo and behold, there was in fact a dildo out there floating in the Oort cloud. Would you continue to insist that the dildo did not exist? No. You'd probably be surprised, but you'd just revise your position, probably, and start wondering how on earth that dildo got out there in the first place. This is the fundamental difference between a religious belief and a belief.
I have no doubt that some atheists would in fact continue to deny the existence of God, even if real, hard, scientific evidence for his existence could be demonstrated. But my guess is, those "religious" atheists are a small minority. Most would probably be genuinely surprised, and would probably change their minds on the spot. They're just not holding their breath.
Not believing in something that you feel to be unlikely is not the same as unwavering religious belief. Hell, there are lots of religious people that discount scientifically testable findings simply because they contradict what some old shepherd dudes wrote a couple of millenia ago. This is an example of unwavering religious belief. Even in light of evidence to the contrary, their self-delusion persists.
And only four production. Why is this news even relevant? Is this the BIGGEST RH -> Oracle transition yet? I mean, eight servers... please, that's a pretty damned small Linux environment. On top of that, they even had a good reason to switch. I think the whole article is meant as flamebait. Of course none of you read it...
Atheism is a religon like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
You're an idiot, i'd rate you as flamebait if I had mod points
Make SELinux enforcing again!
Not collecting stamps is a hobby if you meet with your weekly "not stamp-collectors" group and discuss how not collecting stamps is the better way of being and share support stories for not-stamp-collecting and write books on how you can be a very happy not-stamp-collector and find meaning in it.
Just like atheism is a religion when you go once a week to your CASH meeting to be with other "like-minded" people and give support, yada yada yada.
If I understand Dirac correctly, his meaning is this: there is no God, and Dirac is his Prophet. -Pauli
If you want a true null belief, that's agnosticism.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Most IT shops have servers dedicated to running their databases, web servers, ERP applications, etc. An OS needs to be certified for the database just as the hardware needs to be certified for the OS. One can certainly argue that neither certification is more or less important than the other, but from a practical standpoint, once you get an OS working on hardware, you're probably good. Other than occasional firmware upgrades, hardware doesn't change, but OS software is very fluid.
If you are an Oracle shop, it's is very preferable to get OS support from Oracle. I've been through the fire with Oracle on Red Hat Linux, and frankly Oracle support was great in comparison to Red Hat support. That's really what the original article is about -- The people complaining about a company switching their Oracle servers to Oracle Linux is just plain silly.
The real debate starts when you are looking into running Oracle Linux for non-Oracle applications. Time will help decide this.