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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.'"
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
Linux users would never be THAT stupid, it's just Microsoft's guerrilla PR tactics aimed at discouraging linux use. Ballmer probably made half the calls himself... oops it's guerrilla not gorilla. My bad, Ballmer wasn't involved at all then.
I can even see the marketing campaign to accompany this "Beyond idiocy - Windows vista".
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"
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).
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.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
'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.
Linux is an OS, not a religion.
That is where you are wrong.
It appears that the need for religion is hardwired into human beings. If they reject religion, they tend to find a new one. Some believe in global warming. Some in their political party. Some in Linux.
Also, remember that since the 60s we live in a society where rudeness is rewarded.
What the Baby Boomers taught us was that you can be a total jackass and if you claim it is for a good cause it is not only excused but celebrated.
Linus >= Jesus, therefore [insert convoluted defense for childish behavior here]. Mods, mod this insightful.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Hardware support is going to be an issue for anyone that chooses to run Oracle Linux. Hardware vendors certify only certain OS makes and models on their boxes, and so far I haven't seen Oracle Linux on the certified lists. It's no fun fighting with your vendor for support and being told you have to install a supported OS before they'll acknowledge that the error you're seeing is caused by their hardware and not the OS that you chose to run.
Oracle might think they're onto something here, but I doubt it's going to catch on until they either A) sell their own hardware and support the entire stack from top to bottom, or B) get their OS certified by most or all of the major hardware vendors -- including card manufacturers like QLogic, EMC, Emulex, and Intel, who like the box vendors, only certify to certain OSes.
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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.
Want to know one of the main stumbling blocks to further widespread adoption of Linux?
Like have time to answer that for you. You know how to google, don't you? RTFA! Damn newbs.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Indeed, having fan boys call people up to ridicule them is unprofessional. Proper, enterprise ready companies just throw chairs.
A true Linux user has a moral responsibility to spread awareness of Linux and all its wonders to the wandering souls of the world. Were it not for the Enlightenment brought forth from these Disciples of Torvalds we would all be condemned to an eternity in the fiery pits of welded-hood doom. Amen brothers!
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
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...
Meanwhile, McLaren told ZDNet Australia Opes had acquired Red Hat support subscriptions with the purchase of two servers from channel partner Dell. The hardware vendor then was responsible for providing Red Hat support to Opes.
I guess nobody reads the articles anymore, but appearently they weren't even RedHat customers. The ran RHEL but only by way of Dell. It would seem to me that if they wanted the best support maybe they should actually have tried paying RedHat for a frickin support contract. RedHat is a mighty generous company but they're not going to call you up out of the blue and offer you support just for the hell of it.
My personal opinion is that they are going from one bad support situation (DELL) to another (Oracle), but it's their business and they have every right to make dumbass decisions. As for people calling them out of the blue to tell them how retarded they are, I have to call bullshit. I don't think anybody knows or cares who these people are or what distro they run.
Ubuntu: If at first you don't succeed, blindly slap a sudo in front of it
Atheism is a religon like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Wow, I never thought I would see the words "alabaster dildo hypothesis" in such a cogent and insightful response.
You're an idiot, i'd rate you as flamebait if I had mod points
Make SELinux enforcing again!
I know a lot of people in the linux community (as well as being a LUG pres.) and I've only run across one person in the last 15 years that was a complete asshole about using Linux and nothing else. Actually, he didn't limit that idealism to just linux - it was basically whatever he was doing was the right way, and everyone else was wrong. That's a pretty small percentage of nut jobs. Take a good look through Bruce Peren's petition*, you'll see the exact opposite of what Opes is talking about. This is also something that has upset and angered a lot of people, but the vast majority of signees (3000+) have kept their comments reasonable. This seems to be more in line with the Linux community I know of.
[*] - http://techp.org/p/1
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
The problem is this. In the United States, RHEL is the standard Linux Distribution for business. Whether you like it or not, those are the facts. They have the market penetration. They, as a company, survive off of support licenses. This is for patches, upgrades, whatever. This includes the guarantee to backport security fixes into dead software (Have RHEL3 and support, you are getting fixes for packages that the original coders have long since abandoned as they've moved forward with releases). It gives you the ability to tell your boss that 7 years from now an RHEL 5 system will *STILL* have vendor support for all security issues. That is something that Microsoft isn't doing. (Want a DST patch for Win2k - you'll have to pay MS for it, even though it is only a 7 year old OS). The problem is. Unbreakable linux is *NOT* a distribution. It is a support agreement to provide support for RHEL systems. They are directly support RHEL3 and RHEL4 via a separate patch path. This undercuts Red Hat and their pricing, basically taking a company that while strong, is hardly rock solid (I believe they made somewhere around $450 million dollars and had a $50 million dollar annual profit). The fall of Red Hat will also (quite obviously) mean the fall of RHEL, and quite possible the Fedora project (Their supported test ground). Where does that leave Oracle? Oracle will no longer have anyone to support, since they are basically using the GPL to abuse the Red Hat porting process and merely paying for an alternate distribution path. When Red Hat dies, Oracle Unbreakable will die as well. The end result? They kill the goose that laid the golden egg. This is why the move by Oracle is dangerous. Getting into the business is one thing, but they are taking direct aim at Red Hat, and abusing the GPL by taking Red Hat code modifications and redistributing them via their own network and charging for it. This is also why there is a general disdain for what Oracle is doing among the linux community. Now, how much of this paragraph turns out to be true, and how much is fud is where the crux of the issue lies. Perhaps Oracle will have their own teams doing backports, and perhaps they will eventually move off of RHEL support onto their own distro, but until they make this move, you can be certain the RH crowd is going to continue these unfortunate tactics.
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.