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."
Re:Sellouts (Score:2, Informative)
They very well may; Oracle acquired hell about a year and a half ago.
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.
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: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.
Re:Thanks a lot, douchebags. (Score:3, Informative)
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 reasons, I don't think they're not giving back.
Yes, they're keeping some know how, but RH does something very similar with patches (they provide much more to their customers). And you don't have to use their Oracle Linux at all (unless you're too weak when dealing with Oracle sales guys). For example the largest local bank uses plenty of Oracle DB instances on top of RH Linux (and HP Unix), but not a single Oracle Linux install AFAIK.
And this whole KSplice topic is a bit silly - they've bought the engineering team, but the tool is open source. Yes, they'll probably change the license etc. but they have the right to do that and we should respect that. We always knew this can happen, after all the KSplice was a company, not a bunch of our slaves. And the tools is open source, so if it was so valuable for other distros, someone will create a fork. If no one forks it, it probably was not that important.
Re:Contempt (Score:4, Informative)
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 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.
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.