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Oracle Acquires K-splice For an Undisclosed Amount
drspliff writes "Oracle today announced it's completed the acquisition of K-Splice, dropping support for Redhat, CentOS, and SUSE, and closing doors to new customers. Unless of course you want to become an Oracle Linux Premier Support subscriber — then it comes as standard."
On July 21, 2011, Oracle announced they acquired Ksplice, Inc. At the time of the company was acquired, Ksplice, Inc. claimed to have over 700 companies using the service to protect over 100,000 servers. While the service had been available for multiple Linux distributions, it was stated at the time Ksplice, Inc. was acquired that "Oracle believes it will be the only enterprise Linux provider that can offer zero downtime updates."
Rot in hell for this.
Oracle may not support non-Oracle Linuxes, but that doesn't mean someone else won't.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I was waiting for that to finally be added. Was it added, and I missed it? Or is the summary wrong?
Well, I imagine what will happen is what's happened to other open source products Oracle got its hands on. Redhat and SUSE will likely step up to the plate and support kernel splicing without the help of K-Splice. Oracle is trying to give customers a reason to use their version of Linux rather than Redhat's or SUSE's. However, stuff like this just pisses customers off.
Honestly, I can't understand why anyone continues to use Oracle products any more than is absolutely necessary. It's said that companies only care about the money and don't care about how evil their vendors are. But Oracle time and time again dicks over their customers, and in ways that cost the customers extra money. Eventually executive golf games with the marketing guys aren't going to be enough to keep the sales coming in.
Which I guess is why they continue to buy established firms and fuck over the existing customer base with price hikes, poorer service, and more restrictive licensing terms.
I'd literally, not figuratively, do things that are best left to the dark corners of the Internets, would it lead to Oracle buying me out.
Fuck this open sores Slashdot fandork mentality. Shakespeare got to get paid, son.
I believe the software was open source so you can still use it... they just won't be doing the legwork of writing the semantic mapping code when patches require it, or pre-certifying the other patches via the subscription service.
There is nothing stopping RedHat from hiring someone to do this work on their end and offering their own subscription service.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
http://www.faqs.org/patents/assignee/ksplice-inc/
Yorn desh born, der ritt de gitt der gue, Orn desh, dee born desh, de umn fork! fork! fork!
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
EOM
Oracle has managed to become the recipient of my complete and utter contempt. Even Microsoft has never managed to do that.
I got a call from Oracle at work the other day. The asked if it was a bad time to call. I said "You are calling from Oracle, it is always a bad time." They didn't seem shocked by this.
They wanted to know why I disliked them so much, so I began listing some of their most unconscionable behavior since their take over of Sun, then when I got bored I hung up on them.
They have not called back yet....
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
"its" not "it's".
Come on, DotSlash. I thought we were the more educated, smarter elites of society here.
Yeah, 2-year uptimes are fun and all, but in a clustered VM environment, reboots aren't really that big a deal.
Oracle needs to take their anti-google stance up a notch - change their motto to "BE EVIL".
I really loved using the ksplice technology to keep my personal collocates patched. Now the 5 bucks a month or whatever it was is far to steep. Cancelling account completed.
Hope oracles blood money is cursed.
This case highlights very well the limits of GPL, and at large, Open source. The value of K-Splice isn't in the code - once you know what it does, it's not really complicated to duplicate its behavior. The value of Ksplice is in the commitment from the parent company to provide the patches to the kernel K Splice will apply. This suppose to have a team to track security advisories, study patches, test how they perform, sometimes write a bit of wrapping code around and release those patches as Kernel modules KSplice can then insmod in the kernel. In short, KSplice is more a full time security response team than a GPL software. By itself, KSplice does nothing. RedHat can fork the software, but it then needs to provide the people to feed it.
They sold out to Microsoft in the same way K-splice sold out to Oracle. Stop kidding yourselves. If anyone forks K-splice it will be RedHat. Novell will just leech.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Their motto isn't "BE EVIL." It's "AM EVIL."
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I read the announcement as Oracle was just going to provide technical support exclusively for Oracle Enterprise Server, not that they would take K-Splice completely off the market.
Also the current version of K-Splice is GPL licensed, so fork away. Oracle is free to relicense future versions of K-Splice.
I've seen too may stories knee-jerk condemning Oracle and haven't seen too much in the way of most of those fears coming true. I reserve my judgment until Oracle actually does something bad.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Larry Ellison wants to be able to afford every organ transplant known to man ... so that way, Jobs will run out of parts and croak off. He's living embodiment a 19th century robber baron....
When I first heard of K-Splice, I thought it was cool, but that didn't mean I was going to use it. I've used almost nothing but FOSS for just over a decade now. I've supporting it together with commercial products on a few occasions, but in the end have always felt limited, frustrated, or been let down by those products. Such experiences reminded me why I switched to FOSS in the first place; to stop hurting myself.
The open source community should have recognized K-Splice for what it was on day one -- a Good Thing -- but then immediately started work on a free alternative. Sometimes that doesn't happen because a closed-source alternative is already available, so fewer people are interested in developing a free alternative. That's never good. In this case, K-Splice customers probably thought they were paying a very reasonable price for a wonderful and unique product/service, but if they had known what was good for them, they would also have been spending a little extra on the side to sponsor some developers to produce a free alternative.
Don't get me wrong here: I have nothing per se against Linux developers selling closed source software by the license in order to earn a living. We could definitely use some more of those. The only problem is, there's no good reason to trust them any more than we would trust any other commercial software company: in the end, the interests of their customers always come last.
for the linux ecosystem. Oracle is a parasite. Ksplice is more than welcome to sell out, but why did it have to be oracle?
Then K-Splice, and then the WHOLE OPEN SOURCE WORLD.
Oracle will shit on anything and buy out anyone they can in order to do such.
I question whether their management is run by businessmen, engineers, users, or professional trolls.
It could just be both the very former and the latter, but it's starting to get old.
I mean, it's one thing if something like Microsoft buys Skype, that's not so bad, but at least Microsoft isn't retarded enough to make Skype "Windows Only".
If I'm thinking this through properly, taking away the user base of a product is almost a greater hit than just not having the product itself. Isn't the user base and market share where it's all at nowadays anyways?
No, you're thinking of the movie where Kevin Spacey plays this guy who may or may not be an alien.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
You cannot acquire a GPL project. Oh, you can acquire a similarly named company that supports developers of said project, though. BFD - new developers can come in and take the place of the old, and things continue the way they're supposed to.
Ksplice is not a completely automated system. It is designed to replace faulty functions but can not change global data structures. Hence, it is up to the user of the ksplice to first clean the patch(es) of any semantic changes to kernel data structures. If the manual process of cleaning the patches is not correctly done, ksplice will still produce an update module but loading the module may cause strange behavior or even crash the system.
It should also be noted that previous to RHEL 6, the employees of Ksplice, Inc. could focus on just reviewing the kernel patches marked as providing security fixes. Because of changes on how RedHat distributes RHEL 6 kernel patches as a single monolithic patch, it would take a lot more effort on the part of Ksplice, Inc. to support RHEL 6 and CentOS 6.
Has anyone else noticed the github repo for ksplice has now disappeared?
Doesn't that violate GNU GPL2 ?
thats what Apple did with Darwin. the people trying to make an open source darwin based distro have been hobbled pretty badly.
so maybe Redhat just introduces a few interesting little tweaks to some meta-portion of their system
if the 'linux community' would stop shitting a brick everytime somebody tries to introduce a micropayment system, OSS developers wouldn't have to sell out.
look at ubuntu's attempt to sell music. oh my god, youd think they stuck a baby in a microwave.
meanwhile, independent artists are fully integrating payment stuff into their websites, where you can buy albums and pay 'as much as you want'. or selling advertising on websites. or you know, asking people to give money.
Yeah and too bad that K-Splice has 3 patents that cover splicing the kernel.
So go fork all you want. Within 24 hours you will have an army of lawyers claiming they own your FOSS project.
Knowing Oracle I figured there had to be a more sinister reason to purchase it. So I did a Google search and sure enough found that link and my suspicions were correct. The moral of the story is if you want to be bought out by Oracle then patent the hell out of your product. Oracle is after the patents and not the software and will be happy to sue anyone who needs this functionality. Unlike Goolge, Redhat does not have the resources to go up and defend itself agaisn't such a powerful litigant.
http://saveie6.com/
The problem I have with kSplice is it is a solution to a problem that most everyone stopped caring about years ago. People with real work to do stopped treating the output of uptime as a sacred cow and started putting the resiliency at the application layer in multi-server environments. Relatively low outage of a component for scheduled maintenance is nice, but reducing that to zero is well beyond the point of diminishing returns since the app better not care if that server goes down anyway (or else for all your efforts an uncorrectable ECC error will come and just ruin your day).
It's been a while since I read up on it, but if I recall it worked kind of like a rehook of system calls as the opportunity arises. This means you don't have a particularly strong assurance that a security or bug fix actually is in effect for all running instance of an application, and it also limited the sorts of updates that could go in. It's kind of like how you could update glibc without explicitly restarting any daemons, but you won't actually see the benefit of that update until you actually take the hit to let the application exit and restart to induce load of the better code into ram.
Hate to admit it, as much as MS got made fun of for rebooting after every update, it really is the way to go in a practical perspective if you don't want to be bitten by some kernel/glibc vulnerability even after you *think* you've updated.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
That's what business is now-a-days. Software patents. Lawyers. Eventually innovation will degrade to 0.
Purchase company making open source product for $millions. Discontinue support for competitors, encouraging fork of open source code. Rest of linux world uses !ksplice. Oracle left holding non-standard, non-community supported code-base worth $pittance.
I find it amusing to watch this self destructive cycle continue...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Patent #1 is finding a safe time to update your software. That means Ubuntu and Windows update violate Oracle's patents because they check at a certain time of the day.
Patent #2 Is finding out which bits of code are changed in a patch. Gnu Diff, RHN, and Patch violate Oracle's new property on checking to see how a patch changed a file.
This is very scary. Basically Oracle can simply sue every Linux distro because it has diff, patch, yum/apt-get, or synaptic and I would not be surprised to see Oracle file injuctions to halt every free distro from existence as they love to pick on the small guys who little pockets who can't defend themselves.
Oracle's true intentions are not in the software product but it's patents. The RHN is effectively Oracle's IP until they can throw it out in court.
http://saveie6.com/
I'm not a big fan of Oracle's 20th century business model, which like a lot of other big name proprietary software companies and other types of companies as well is predicated on doing everything possible to obtain vendor lock-in, then charge through the nose for licensing and support, forcing upgrades, and basically squeezing customers at every opportunity. That's the downside of the model - in one way it sees customers as prey to be devoured.
The flipside of this is that proprietary companies like Oracle do make considerable investment to create solid, reliable product offerings, and they try to provide high quality support.
There are other proprietary companies out there who have Procrustean approaches; they don't spend time developing or innovating but rather continue to ride the gravy train of code that was written years and years ago. Customers have to alter their problems to fit the proprietary solutions. This is true in part of some of the niche applications aimed at specific vertical markets Oracle has acquired, but Oracle's acquisition has actually brought new life to languishing applications and brought Oracle's support processes to those same small app vendors.
Oracle targets customers who are willing to pay high prices for high quality software and willing to pay high prices for support. Is the cost justifiable? It depends - for some companies the risk exposure of getting 90% of the functionality of Oracle-type products for free or for very low cost is worthwhile, and the risk exposure of being without an enterprise-class support organization (or paying for support on a per-instance basis, sometimes through a consultant if no such support plan is offered for a given application) is justifiable. It's a decision each technology using company has to make for themselves.
Oracle's acquisition of the K Splice project is consistent with their business model.
Their business model is not amenable to me personally, but in some cases it might be a good fit for some of my customers. In those cases I can recommend Oracle's solutions, even though I am not fond of Oracle's business practices, which to some may seem avaricious, but to others may simply be a sign of an aggressively run profitable company that offers high end products and services and demands concomitant prices.
As to whether Oracle will contribute to the K Splice community or hold its own code contributions proprietary is their call. Past history indicates that they may not be enthusiastic contributors to the community but any prediction of how they will act in this case is pure conjecture. We'll have to wait and see.
I know the GPLv3 is better for covering patents, but (IANAL) even with GPLv2 wouldn't it prove problematic for a patent holder to distribute GPL works covered by patents they own, and then try and enforce those patents at a later date?
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
Seems that if Britney had only held on to him a bit longer, she could have made a mint.
Prior art dating back to PDP-11. Why Microsoft's patent application was rejected. Come at me bro.
Oracle's moving into MMA???
Still news, I guess.
If the combination of a spoon and a fork is a spork, I suggest you name it "splork".
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
I've made a quick search and saw that Oracle removed the http://www.ksplice.com/git/ksplice.git/ and also removed http://blog.ksplice.com
I guess they wouldn't appreciate a fork
And it was a precious resource. Now I am stuck to the wayback machine and browsing search engine caches... :(
http://web.archive.org/web/20101213212354/http://blog.ksplice.com/
Oracle is plain evil.
I used ksplice at the last company I was working at on dozens of machines. It saved us so much downtime and pain with kernel updates. I was pushing it at the current company I work at... good luck now though :( I found the whole Sun being bought out thing dpressing, this actually makes me angry. While we are an Oracle shop in regards to databases, we are phasing out all out Sun gear (SANs, servers etc). We found the support for the Sun equipment once Oracle bought them out turned completely useless and pathetic.
Why does every company Oracle touch appear to go to shit?
OK, I buy that the real value is providing the diffs for critical patches in a timely manner.
So Oracle does that now. What exactly is the copyright status of the diffs? Both bits
are from GPL kernel code.
Ok, yes, the MS system is technically less capable (and frustratingly so, since something like lsof is baked in and sometimes you have something as trivial as a config file to deal with).
The subsequent *behavior* is not necessarily a bad thing from a practical perspective. If you play things just right, and deal with your system the right way, you might be able to restart the bare minimum stuff around a library update by leveraging the features in a Linux environment to their fullest. It is about 1000 times more likely that you'll not keep good track of that and omit things, resulting sometimes in stale libraries, or, as another person mentions, a time bomb if an update opens the existing inode for rewrite instead of unlink, then write (I've seen some things do this, presumably in the hopes of making the new code effective sooner, but almost always with the result of a segfaulting process for reasons beyond my understanding).
For reasons already stated, one physical server should have/comprise a 'critical service'. Even if your update mechanisms achieve perfect continuity, there are so many things *impossible* to avoid that will one day take that down.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
uhh....
First off: Let the Oracle bashing begin!!!!! :-D
Second: well, ksplice is supposed to be opensource right? at least that's what wikipedia said when I looked at it. So isn't it most probable that somebody will just compile that source into openOracleYouDummiesSplikce v0.3?
that's all really...
-- no sig today
For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
By distributing it, they've already granted an implicit patent license. They'd have difficulty enforcing the relevant patents in light of this.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
A foundation is needed fuck off all enterprise company!!
Except that binary kernel modules for Linux are illegal.