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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."
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.
Reminds me of that South Park episode:
"What's a sellout?"
- "If you work in the entertainment industry and you make any money, you're a sellout".
Seriously, these guys created K-Splice and they should keep their business going as is, instead of selling to Oracle for (probably) an ass-load of money? For you? Or should they be free to do with their business and their product as they please?
You, of course, are free to create your own version of K-Splice. Except of course that Oracle will have tied up the idea with patents and a pack of blood-thirsty lawyers.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.