Worse, I find myself applauding the devil for their championing Open Source! This is Oracle! The lawnmower[0]! The company that killed OpenSolaris! What mad world is this!?
I think like, a big part of this was Solaris has near zero chance of gaining headshare among people who need Unix. Solaris has value for customers with vendor lock in, and its a declining revenue source which can be ridden out for a decade or two, and then discontinued.
Yeah, probably the consistent way to explain it is that Oracle thought they could get away with it for Solaris but the market of Linux distros is quite healthy and they don't have the power to pull the same thing so they push the other angle instead.
That's exactly right; I was surprised way back when that Linux wasn't cutting into the Windows marketshare very much at all, despite all the noise and fury coming from Redmond, but it was absolutely decimating big iron UNIX.
Windows was already on low-margin consumer x86 boxes so there wasn't the same opportunity.
Linux enabled commodity hardware to eat Big Iron's lunch using that same x86. Dell and IBM certainly made a good business filling datacenter racks with their x86 offerings for quite some time.
Free software works in part because it forces us, consumers, developers, businesses, into a better optimum than an a proprietary ecosystem. And that makes it work because it aligns incentives of self interested companies with keeping it open as we're seeing here.
Big tech companies have a history of supporting the community where doing so attacks their competitors’ cash cows.
There’s also that Oracle linux was formed from RHEL.
Maybe let’s not confuse Oracle undermining their competitor’s moat with their genuinely being on the side of the community.
It’s been a while, but the necessity of MariaDB and Percona also seem to show that Oracle’s been very much on the other side of this kind of move in the past.
> Finally, to IBM, here’s a big idea for you. You say that you don’t want to pay all those RHEL developers? Here’s how you can save money: just pull from us. Become a downstream distributor of Oracle Linux. We will happily take on the burden.
I'd love for Red Hat to call Oracle's bluff, but it would never happen.
Oracle's definitely been on the wrong side of these arguments for long enough that I wouldn't give the benefit of the doubt.
This. It's more like a happy accident. If Oracle had a stated principle which was virtuous, and did something to specifically to uphold that principle when anyone else might have done something else, that would be something you thank them for. And this is not that.
However there is also another idea that I think is valid, which is "reward the behavior you want to see". Whyever they did it, if it's good, you let them know that you want that and you don't burn them the one time they do something you always say you want.
I still don't thank them though. There is no reasonable hope of ever influencing Oracle to become something 100% the opposite of what they are at their very core. So F them. I see no point in worrying about failing to reward the behavior you want to see in this case. You will never get the behavior you really want out of Oracle, and so all you would be doing is letting them influence you, not you influencing them.
> However there is also another idea that I think is valid, which is "reward the behavior you want to see"
Yes, I agree with this as well. It's all complicated.
Oracle only cares about one thing: profits. So any meaningful way of rewarding their behavior would have to come in the form of giving them more money. Every dollar you spend is, after all, a vote telling the entity you gave the dollar to to keep on doing whatever it is they're doing.
This one fairly self-serving press release isn't enough for me to give Oracle any money, though. I don't think they'd take the right lesson from it. Especially because I'm not the sort of big spender that Oracle really cares about.
