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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.