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."

Comments

Thanks a lot, douchebags.

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

Re:Thanks a lot, douchebags.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ksplice don't own any patents. Microsoft's patent application on a similar technique was rejected - due to clear prior art dating back to the PDP-11.

Ksplice's value was in smart engineers, but it's time for a distro - a proper distro, that is - to merge this as part of their normal update cycle, and possibly finally implement usplice() as well.

Damn, they were kind of cool until this. Now they got bought by Oracle. Everyone knows what happens when you get bought by Oracle. I'm kind of annoyed. I'm a Ksplice customer. Or was a Ksplice customer, in any case; unless I can get a very clear answer about future support and pricing in writing, we're done professionally.

Re:Sellouts

[syousef]

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..

Re:Sellouts

[JaredOfEuropa]

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.

Re:Contempt

[multipartmixed]

Yeah. Jonathan fucked up sunsolve, but Larry's made it even worse.

You know what I had to do the other day? Go through a STACK of Ultra 5s looking for a motherboard with the right version of OpenBoot to work properly in the server I was repairing (which was running a printing press) based on an Ultra 10.

You know what the Sun^H^H^HOracle answer to my problem is? Re-validate the server because it's been out of support for 10 years (several thousand dollars and many days' wait), get a support contract on it, and then access SunSolve to download the right firmware. FUCK THAT. When I bought those boxes, I could just log in and download it. I should have spidered the damn site, I guess.

Hey, that's another thing. I re-built a Solaris 10 11/06 server the other day, and went to build SpiderMonkey on it. I need NSPR 4.7, that requires a patch to SUNWpr and SUNWprd. I had to crawl through old /export/home backups until I found the patches I wanted. To effing GPLd software. Couldn't download the patches from Sun any more. WTF!

I'm so pissed at Sun these days. I'm a legal Solaris license holder, running on Sun hardware that I don't have a support contract on. I do my own support, always have. Occasionally I buy support-by-the-hour if I get in over my head (but that hasn't happened in years).

So. Now I can't download security patches for the OS. That's right. If anybody finds a hole in the OS they can just drive a truck through and I can't do anything about it. Thank God I don't run any Sun-supplied daemons bare on the 'net.

And this really pisses me off, I have been a Sun customer since '98 and user since '92. I love the hardware, I love the OS, I love the storage arrays, I love the cluster software, I love the end-to-end-to-integration, but I hate the direction the business is taking.

I'm just really having a hard time finding good solutions to replace my Sun boxes. So far, LXC looks like a good substitute for sparse-root zones, but I haven't found things like SUNWstade, Sun Cluster, etc., that work nearly as well. Fortunately my development work is GNU-stack, so I'm not stuck porting away from Sun Forte.

GRR!

Sorry, just needed to vent. Very frustrated user here.