Oracle Acquires K-splice For an Undisclosed Amount 226
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."
Thanks a lot, douchebags. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oracle failed to read the license I think.
RedHat, please fork ksplice today.
Re:Thanks a lot, douchebags. (Score:4, Funny)
CentOS, copy RedHat's fork of ksplice today*.
*For sufficiently large values of "today".
Re:Thanks a lot, douchebags. (Score:4, Insightful)
RedHat, please fork ksplice today.
The really shitty thing is that Oracle Enterprise Linux is essentially a fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in the same sense that CentOS is. Oracle has already been distributing a version of Linux that gives back nothing to the company that does most of the hard work to make it enterprise-ready. Now it's adding new components to Oracle Enterprise Linux in such a way as to tell the rest of the community it can't have them anymore. If Red Hat wants to fork K-Splice, that's possible under the license, but again Red Hat will have to do all of the work, and Oracle will contribute nothing.
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I have heard a rumor that Red Hat is planning to do something to make it harder for Oracle to clone them. I don't know any details, and I'm not sure how you'd go about doing that with an Open Source OS; but the person who mentioned it was directly tied to Red Hat. If they succeed it will make life harder for Cent and Scientific, which will really suck. Red Hat feels (assuming this person is correct), that Oracle is backing them into a corner with the way they sell OEL, and I can't say I'd blame them.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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All I could picture was the scene from The Big Lebowski where John Goodman's character beats the shit out of a corvette parked on the street yelling, "This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!"
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IIRC it was providing patches rather than complete altered sources.
obfuscate the build and/or other meta-programs (Score:2)
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
Re:obfuscate the build and/or other meta-programs (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:obfuscate the build and/or other meta-programs (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Why is that shitty, exactly? I'm not saying I love Oracle, but the ability to fork is one of the great freedoms with open source - not that every company should breed their own distro, but it's not necessarily bad. Oracle's politics is to sell products with their logos on the box so they resell Red Hat. BTW it's not true they're not giving anything back - according to the stats, they're usually in TOP10 companies (see http://www.remword.com/kps_result/ [remword.com]). So while I don't like Oracle for a lot of various rea
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How about this for support: Oracle support, which we pay a premium for, cannot fix their own product, so they bring in ACS to assist, but want us to pay extra for ACS. Oracle support is beyond sub-par. I'm thankful I'm not dealing with them or directly on the project, but I feel sorry for the folks who are - a project that has hit bug after bug for over a year now.
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Unfortunately, telling you how shitty Oracle WebLogic support is would probably result in my being disciplined by my current employer, not Oracle WebLogic support before anyone asks.
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We've had an open support request with them for over a month now, they still haven't fixed the problem. The problem, so far as I can tell, is that they simply didn't package all the files required for the Windows platform in one of their archives.
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RedHat, please fork ksplice today.
The really shitty thing is that Oracle Enterprise Linux is essentially a fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in the same sense that CentOS is. Oracle has already been distributing a version of Linux that gives back nothing to the company that does most of the hard work to make it enterprise-ready. Now it's adding new components to Oracle Enterprise Linux in such a way as to tell the rest of the community it can't have them anymore. If Red Hat wants to fork K-Splice, that's possible under the license, but again Red Hat will have to do all of the work, and Oracle will contribute nothing.
Pity the nice guys with the funky logo didn't buy the assholes with a boring logo
Re:Thanks a lot, douchebags. (Score:4, Funny)
RedHat, please fork ksplice today.
I'd rather watch them fork poshsplice or gingersplice... I'm assuming that ksplice is the new name for kfed after he joined the splice girls...
Naming suggestion (Score:2)
Re:Thanks a lot, douchebags. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Everyone knows what happens when you get bought by Oracle
You get a big pile of money, quit, and start a company doing the same thing as before?
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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."
Only 100k servers across 700 companies? That's barely anything (~140 servers per company) - they must be pretty small outfits.
Sellouts (Score:2, Insightful)
Rot in hell for this.
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They very well may; Oracle acquired hell about a year and a half ago.
Re:Sellouts (Score:5, Funny)
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..
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(ROT13ed Answers: bar bs NzoreCbvag, Fvyire Perrx Flfgrzf, be Pbairetva. No peeking!)
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You mean: One Rich Asshole Called Larry Elison. The C was missing, unless that was part of the enterprise license?
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Fork time! Can't be all that bad. I wasn't even sure it was open source, but Wikipedia claims it is (was?).
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Fork a splice? That has to be redundant lol
Re:Sellouts (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
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Because they were the ones who were buying, perhaps?
I suppose that Slashdot could have gotten together and bought them...
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I'm not upset for ksplice selling, I'm upset about Oracle buying it just to destroy it :(
Well, Oracle's probably gonna offer it as a feature of their RHEL clone, but the biggest mystery to me is why Redhat would have given them a pass (we have to assume they talked to Redhat before selling out). Perhaps something similar is in the offing.
Re:Sellouts (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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Morals have no place in the business world. If you had your gefilte fish factory and Hitler came up to you offering you enough money to comfortably find yourself a corner of the planet to live without ever working again, would you take it?
If you say no then I congratulate you. You'd be a better man than most of the rest of the world.
One thing to also remember is that our views of Hitler are shaped by the history which was written by the Allies. The reality is that at the time Hitler had a LOT of supporters
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The only place morals have in business is through PR.
You see, by itself, killing children for 10 bucks each with a cost of a dollar per bullet is a good margin.
It's the outraged public that will boycott, sue, and protest that will nail you in the pocketbook.
Considering that your customers are probably just as conniving and greedy as you are, they probably don't give a shit either, and the few folks that have a heart are going to be drowned out by the masses that don't.
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"I got mine" is practically rational.
If you're "only looking out for number one" and do not give a shit about anyone but yourself, then it is quite rational to be selfish. Game theory even demands it.
Re:Sellouts (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing with a false dilemma is that it doesn't afford you the possibility of having morals.
FTFY.
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That must have been a tough fix, since I didn't even present a dilemma.
You most certainly did. Several, in fact.
You argued that selling to one party is no different than selling to another and that you can only sell or not sell. That's a false dilemma. Most rational people would agree that selling diesel fuel to the Nazis is a lot different than selling it at a truck stop in Kansas. Even a real bastard would recognize the difference between selling chemicals to a factory up the river from your own house and selling them to a factory in another state.
You then extended this fall
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Just for the record, these are called false dichotomies, not false dilemmas.
The two phrases mean the same thing. Just for the record, in modern usage "false dilemma" is probably used more often than "false dichotomy."
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Capitalism doesn't by itself prevent you from having morals. It just makes it more expensive to have them than not.
Competition with douchebag companies that don't have morals is what keeps you evil. If you do good the costs will push you out of the market.
It's cheaper to be evil.
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You have to be evil enough for your customers to hate your evil more than they like the bargain your evil gives them.
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"Randroids".. heh
I like that. :)
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When you think of free software, think of freedom of speech.
Yes, the most important aspect of open source is libre-freedom, not beer-freedom. But the GPL makes it very hard to charge for freely-forkable software. This pushes commercial open source companies to do things like requiring copyright assignment for community contributions, keeping part of the software proprietary, and keeping documentation closed.
There's no reason the licence for a piece of software can't make it freely-forkable while requiring payment for its use. I prefer a value-added model, where t
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What's the use of a fork, if the original developers can shut it down by refusing to license it? If you essentially have to ask for permission to distribute your fork, how is that 'libre' in any way?
There's no reason the licence for a piece of software can't make it freely-forkable while requiring payment for its use.
Sure. You can write a license that requires distributors to do anything. Just don't expect the FSF or OSI to bend their principles for you.
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What's the use of a fork, if the original developers can shut it down by refusing to license it? If you essentially have to ask for permission to distribute your fork, how is that 'libre' in any way?
It's not possible to change the license on code that was already released as GPLv2, since the license you would work from would be the one in force when you received your copy. In addition, the license can't be changed unless all copyright holders agree, and if the K-splice code contains any contributions that have not had copyright assigned to the K-splice team, then it might never change (unless Oracle has some really deep pockets...if I were in such a position, I would demand 100M shares of Oracle stock
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I wasn't talking about K-splice, I was talking about GP's idea of creating a new license that required payment to the original devs each time you'd distribute a copy of your fork.
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Doesn't this description basically fit RedHat?
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Moochers and leachers (Score:2)
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.
So much for K-splice (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Oracle is trying to give customers a reason to use their half-assed clone of RedHat Linux rather than Redhat's or SUSE's.
FTFY.
In a way, it's kind of nice. Oracle will have to ensure RHEL compatibility of kSplice, whereas out-of-the-box it appears the only normally supported options are Ubuntu or Fedora. And since kSplice is GPL2 [tds.net], that means that the community will benefit from Oracle's generosity and public-minded support.
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If Oracle own the copyright, which I believe they now do, they don't have to release any future versions under the GPL. Obviously if you can find an existing GPL copy, you can continue to use it, and you can fork it, but you can't rely on Oracle to support it or update it in the future.
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If Oracle own the copyright, which I believe they now do, they don't have to release any future versions under the GPL. Obviously if you can find an existing GPL copy, you can continue to use it, and you can fork it, but you can't rely on Oracle to support it or update it in the future.
But if that's the case.... Can you link it to the GPL Linux kernel?
Tempest in a teapot...
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Yes, you can legally link binary blobs to the Linux kernel. See the nVidia driver for example: a binary blob with an interface layer that is shipped as source and compiled for each target kernel. Not much complaining about that one, in fact.
Re:So much for K-splice (Score:5, Informative)
In a way, it's kind of nice. Oracle will have to ensure RHEL compatibility of kSplice, whereas out-of-the-box it appears the only normally supported options are Ubuntu or Fedora.
In the announcement Oracle says flat-out that it does not plan to support RHEL. It may be that any changes Oracle makes will probably work fine with RHEL because of the (ahem) similarity between Oracle's distro and Red Hat's, but RHEL customers do not pay Red Hat to distribute a version of Linux with patches that are supposed to work because Oracle says so. Red Hat will still have to do all its usual testing and integration on anything that goes into RHEL, and it will also be on the hook to provide support to its enterprise customers, so whatever Oracle does to the source code saves Red Hat pretty much nothing.
Also, Oracle could easily make its own fork of K-Splice right now and release it exclusively under a proprietary license, because it just became the copyright holder. There's nothing that precludes a copyright holder from making a derivative work based on its own GPL code and releasing it under a different license. If Oracle did change the license, any old versions of K-Splice would still be available under the GPL, but Oracle would be free to distribute any future versions as binary-only modules.
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Also, Oracle could easily make its own fork of K-Splice right now and release it exclusively under a proprietary license, because it just became the copyright holder. There's nothing that precludes a copyright holder from making a derivative work based on its own GPL code and releasing it under a different license. If Oracle did change the license, any old versions of K-Splice would still be available under the GPL, but Oracle would be free to distribute any future versions as binary-only modules.
They became a copyright holder, but not necessarily the copyright holder. If you contributed GPL code to K-Splice, and Ksplice Inc sold itself to Oracle, that would not transfer your copyrights.
I.e. Oracle would have to excise any and all code they don't hold the copyrights to. That may be difficult.
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"There's nothing that precludes a copyright holder from making a derivative work based on its own GPL code and releasing it under a different license."
Except, you know, the GPL license itself. Ironic how you used the word derivative, proving the point in your own statement...
"but Oracle would be free to distribute any future versions as binary-only modules."
Again, the GPL license, it doesn't magically get removed by a "new version". They thought long and hard when they came up with it, its not perfect and you can still ruin it thoroughly (see: Tivo) but its not as simple as you seem to think.
Actually, if you own the copyright, you can release it under any license you please, and you're not required to release your own work under any sort of public license whatsoever. The part you're not thinking about is that the person doing the releasing under whichever license they please doesn't need a license to use their own code in any way they see fit... "derivative work" or not.... They own the copyright.
You see, all they have to do is stop releasing "new" versions under the GPL, and anyone and everyon
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That assumes that they own all of the code, and that none of it was either contributed by a third party or is a derivative work of someone else's GPL code.
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I love their modified "Enterprise Kernel" that their OEL 5.6 and above run. Good luck getting VMWare guest additions to run on that.. First thing I do on my oracle test boxes is remove the 'enterprise kernel' and use the stock one. (that redhat builds..)
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Oracle wants to sell a hardware+OS bundle. The people that buy those bundles will not know or care about these issues. So Oracle isn't supporting RedHat or SuSE anymore, but these customers won't care either since they'll use whatever comes in their bundle. Now if there are existing customers with existing support contracts with Oracle then Oracle will have to provide the support; this may mean Oracle does all the work to change the OS, or it may mean that they actually have to support RedHat & SuSE
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Honestly, I can't understand why anyone continues to use Oracle products any more than is absolutely necessary
Because most *companies* don't care about their practices in acquiring resources, they worry about the cost and support and performance of what they buy. For the most part only the fringe ( me included, not casting stones ) worry about that part, and our purchases don't make or break a company like Oracle.
Of course we can debate if Oracle provides any of those, but that isn't my point here :)
Expected (Score:2)
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.
Time for the Swedish Kernel Developer... (Score:4, Funny)
Yorn desh born, der ritt de gitt der gue, Orn desh, dee born desh, de umn fork! fork! fork!
Contempt (Score:5, Informative)
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....
Re:Contempt (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Contempt (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Contempt (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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> You have an out of support by 10 years system with no contract
> and you want services from Oracle/Sun to support your system.
I want the same services that were present when I bought the product and got the OS license.
I don't think that's unreasonable -- you can't change what's been bought after the fact. Like my iPhone, I don't use it to listen to music, but if they turned around and disabled that function in an iOS update I would be livid.
Hell, I wouldn't even have been upset at being asked to pay
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To the bystander, it sounds suspiciously like YOU were the jerk in that scenario. You just told off phone support reps who have nothing to do with the acquisitions and business policy of Oracle.
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To the bystander, it sounds suspiciously like YOU were the jerk in that scenario. You just told off phone support reps who have nothing to do with the acquisitions and business policy of Oracle.
If the business policy of Oracle affects whether customers want to do business with them, it absolutely is the business of the support and sales reps to know this, so that they can report the effect on customers. How else is Oracle going to get feedback and change their behaviour?
I'm sure it was quite clear in the call that the problem was with Oracle, not with the sales rep, in which case I don't see the problem.
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Er, sorry, but the clue is in your answer: "rep"... they are Oracle representatives.
And how would you expect to deal with them? Afresh and without-history on every phone call from a different rep? Nope. They are a company, an entity within itself, and they are representatives. You are speaking to the company - if you say that their sales offer is "stupid", you are talking about the company's offer, not that individual person.
Also, if you are a rep for a company, you MUST expect this distinction, otherwi
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No, but they act as the interface between the organisation and its customer base. 'Rep' means 'representative' so you might as well tell them how you want them to represent you (an unhappy customer) in their feedback and internal reports - assuming they bother to 'tell it like it is' to the grown-ups.
BE EVIL (Score:2)
Oracle needs to take their anti-google stance up a notch - change their motto to "BE EVIL".
they already have (Score:2)
Their motto isn't "BE EVIL." It's "AM EVIL."
The limits of FOSS (Score:2)
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SuSE/Novell is just as bad (Score:2)
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.
Can we start developing a FOSS alternative now? (Score:2)
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 G
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Hmm, KSplice is GPLv2 licensed.
Worth it? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
First Java, (Score:2)
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, takin
Forking ksplice service is non-trival (Score:2, Informative)
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
way to go oracle (Score:2)
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...
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Hey, it worked (for a certain definition of "worked") for OpenOffice...
Kslice patents (Score:2)
Patent #1 is finding a safe time to update your software. [faqs.org] 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 [faqs.org]. 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 inj
This is simple consistency with Oracle's practices (Score:2, Insightful)
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
She missed her chance! (Score:2)
Seems that if Britney had only held on to him a bit longer, she could have made a mint.
Oracle Being Even More Evil (Score:2)
Still news, I guess.
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And what about the VM's ?
Or do you have a cluster with OpenVZ (they do not have their own kernel) ?
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Given the sentence, it could be "Oracle today announced its completed the acquisition of K-Splice" or "Oracle today announced it has [it's] completed the acquisition of K-Splice." So yes, "it's" is correct. However, had the "the" been removed, "its" would have been correct: "Oracle today announced its completed acquisition of K-Splice."
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http://en.swpat.org/wiki/GPLv2_and_patents [swpat.org]
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Has anyone else noticed the github repo for ksplice has now disappeared?
Doesn't that violate GNU GPL2 ?
If they've stopped distributing the software, are they compelled for some reason to continue distributing the source?