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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."
They very well may; Oracle acquired hell about a year and a half ago.
They won't rot in hell. Hell comes with Oracle Enterprise edition. The Ksplice guys only have Oracle Standard Edition. But they don't want to let go of their existing licenses because the new licenses are sold on a per core rather than per machine basis and they can't afford that. Therefore they only get to go to purgatory, which comes bundled with Standard Edition..
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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...
Yeah, what a bunch of jerks developing and offering a service and then making money with it and ultimately getting a (hopefully) nice payday when someone wants to buy it.
When you think of free software, think of freedom of speech. I may not agree with what you're saying but I'll defend your right to say it. Same thing here. It's not like nobody else could implement something similar, it's just not provided to you on a sliver platter for free anymore so your nerd-hackles are raised.
If you couldn't see this given their long term service model then.. well. Pay closer attention. Any subscription based service for Linux isn't intent on strengthening open source software.
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."
There is a difference between selling your company to another one and selling it to Oracle. This would be like selling your gefilte fish factory to Hitler.
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?
I didn't see you offering to pay their bills.
The thing with a false dilemma is that it doesn't afford you the possibility of having morals.
FTFY.
Breakfast served all day!
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?
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.
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.
Yes, you're absolutely right. My comment was written to answer all previous people who wrote along the line "no problem, KSplice is GPL anyway, RedHat can pickup where Oracle left". Well, no, it's not that simple. It may happen, but the human factor tops by a large margin the software factor. At this rate, it's also possible Linus includes self-healing capabilities in the kernel someday - it may happen. But right now, all the people depending on KSplice are in the situation of TV sets owners when the cable company goes under : whatever your make and model of TV, no broadcast equals no image.
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/
so maybe Redhat just introduces a few interesting little tweaks to some meta-portion of their system
They already do this - that's why CentOS 6 took nearly a year to arrive.
"Go build libfoo.so.7 under Fedora 13 using an old version of mock and then link it again the bar object files" to get a binary-compatible RPM. RHEL's build process isn't self-hosting.
Oracle is cheerfully pissing in the well. At some point that's gonna cost them.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
And yet Scientific Linux was able to release months ahead of CentOS from the same RH source....
Right, they built it all as self-hosted and did not achieve binary compatibility. Different goals.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)