Scientific Linux had declared that they would not be doing a full distro for 8, because they felt they were too redundant with CentOS, and was a waste of effort.
Oracle is on the face of it a very viable CentOS alternative. However, it *is* Oracle and thus most people are understandably skeptical that Oracle would keep it nice as Oracle is notorious for changing terms of free software to suddenly have huge problems for users.
Oracle Linux has as far as I am aware been around since 5. I recall we stopped buying RHEL at a previous employer because support from Oracle was less (like 8x less) than buying licenses for RHEL, and we used Oracle Database so the relationship with Oracle was already there. That was 10 years ago, and it is still around and free
I strongly suspect that Linux is a relatively smaller team in Oracle behaving like a sane Linux oriented product mainly because their bosses recognize their share is too small to bother exploiting. I think the Linux team is doing things right, but I just have a difficult time trusting the larger Oracle.
The JRE debacle was pretty cut and dry exactly the play I'd be worried about. Sun's JRE was the *standard* JRE choice, and that stayed the case as Oracle acquired sun. With Oracle as the defacto choice in java runtimes, they ultimately made it a paid-only option back in 2019. Combined with their questionable audit & invoice practices, this created a nightmare for some businesses. For example my company software included optional.jnlp software to launch java client from a browser. At one customer, Oracle's audit noticed the.jnlp link existing on web servers and invoiced the company for every employee, despite no Oracle JRE installed anywhere, because, as they figured, there wouldn't be a.jnlp if there was no JRE to run it, and of course the customer was probably running Oracle, even if they didn't detect it. As a result, several customers have declared that their procurement now reviews products for any java content and will reject products that use java.
Maybe I do not understand but (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Scientific Linux had declared that they would not be doing a full distro for 8, because they felt they were too redundant with CentOS, and was a waste of effort.
Oracle is on the face of it a very viable CentOS alternative. However, it *is* Oracle and thus most people are understandably skeptical that Oracle would keep it nice as Oracle is notorious for changing terms of free software to suddenly have huge problems for users.
Re: Maybe I do not understand but (Score:1)
Re: Maybe I do not understand but (Score:2)
I strongly suspect that Linux is a relatively smaller team in Oracle behaving like a sane Linux oriented product mainly because their bosses recognize their share is too small to bother exploiting. I think the Linux team is doing things right, but I just have a difficult time trusting the larger Oracle.
The JRE debacle was pretty cut and dry exactly the play I'd be worried about. Sun's JRE was the *standard* JRE choice, and that stayed the case as Oracle acquired sun. With Oracle as the defacto choice in java runtimes, they ultimately made it a paid-only option back in 2019. Combined with their questionable audit & invoice practices, this created a nightmare for some businesses. For example my company software included optional .jnlp software to launch java client from a browser. At one customer, Oracle's audit noticed the .jnlp link existing on web servers and invoiced the company for every employee, despite no Oracle JRE installed anywhere, because, as they figured, there wouldn't be a .jnlp if there was no JRE to run it, and of course the customer was probably running Oracle, even if they didn't detect it. As a result, several customers have declared that their procurement now reviews products for any java content and will reject products that use java.