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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"
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
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.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
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
Linux is not the problem. Oracle is the problem. But then, Red Hat fanatics are bar none the worst fanboys in my ever-so-humble opinion. Gentoo users are often like rice boys, but they're using the system and I have no beef with them. I'm a Ubuntu user these days, so clearly I have nothing against Ubuntu users (I'm not one of them self-hating types.) But Red Hat users, which I stopped being around 6.1, are clinging desperately to a distribution that doesn't care about them unless they have shitpiles of money. That goes for Fedora, too. ObDisclaimer: This is all my opinion. You may feel differently. If I think you're being a bozo in your reply to this comment, I may flame you. You have been warned.
Oracle is one of the great anti-freedom evils of our time simply because they backed the national ID database. Corporations have no heart - Oracle is willing to get behind such a proposal simply to sell their product.
You are welcome to forget! Everyone else does anyway. But Oracle is bad and wrong and supporting Oracle is therefore bad and wrong.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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