So what does everyone else think of Oracle's announcement? http:// developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/25/2316221
I kind of think that they are going to be hurting RedHat (a valuable partner if you believe their deployment numbers).
Oh silly, silly Larry. I guess the only hope that we have is that it actually increases mind share of RHEL and hence broader support for it (and subsequently CentOS).
Tarun
So what does everyone else think of Oracle's announcement? http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/25/2316221
I kind of think that they are going to be hurting RedHat (a valuable partner if you believe their deployment numbers).
Oh silly, silly Larry. I guess the only hope that we have is that it actually increases mind share of RHEL and hence broader support for it (and subsequently CentOS).
Tarun
Historically speaking, if the tremendous spread and growth of Christianity under persecution is any indication of what lies ahead, then Redhat and Linux in general should continue to flourish abundantly...
Purchase.... that he might do... once he slams the stock price to the virtual pittance it was a few times over the last several years.
I just cannot imagine he would buy and kill off one of the greatest mediums for the potential housing, need, running, and distribution of his products as RHEL.
- rh
-- Robert - Abba Communications Computer & Internet Services (509) 624-7159 - www.abbacomm.net
Tarun Reddy wrote:
So what does everyone else think of Oracle's announcement?
Somebody pointed out on the Fedora list, if you are an Oracle customer it can make sense to get the OS support from a one-stop shop, plus if you are still worried about SCO you can get IP indemnity. (They surely wouldn't offer the indemnity unless they are pretty damn sure it will never be called on, which incidentally is good news for all Linux users).
However as the guy on fedora-list pointed out, what do Oracle know about generic Linux server support outside of where it touches Oracle? Viva la Redhat.
-Andy
On Wed, 2006-10-25 at 21:46 -0600, Tarun Reddy wrote:
So what does everyone else think of Oracle's announcement? http:// developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/25/2316221
I kind of think that they are going to be hurting RedHat (a valuable partner if you believe their deployment numbers).
Well ... IBM, Novell and Oracle were very unhappy when Red Hat bought JBOSS. Red Hat has now deployed the Red Hat Web Application Stack that includes 2 JBOSS application server products and competes with other middleware produced by Oracle and IBM.
Oracle just considers this tit-for-tat in that they are going to move into Red Hat's market if Red Hat insists on moving into theirs.
Red Hat made a business decision to grow their business in a different direction and, according to Oracle, that caused the Oracle action. It is too late now to put either genie back in the bottle.
Regardless where you stand on this issue, it should not have come as a surprise to anyone.
This might have an impact on RHEL, I don't see it having any impact on CentOS. (The cost difference between RHEL ES and the Oracle versions are not that great, at least on i386 ... and any supported oracle database is going to be on a paid OS anyway, be it Oracle or RHEL)
Thanks, Johnny Hughes
On Thu, 2006-10-26 at 09:22 -0500, Johnny Hughes wrote:
On Wed, 2006-10-25 at 21:46 -0600, Tarun Reddy wrote:
So what does everyone else think of Oracle's announcement? http:// developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/25/2316221
I kind of think that they are going to be hurting RedHat (a valuable partner if you believe their deployment numbers).
Well ... IBM, Novell and Oracle were very unhappy when Red Hat bought JBOSS. Red Hat has now deployed the Red Hat Web Application Stack that includes 2 JBOSS application server products and competes with other middleware produced by Oracle and IBM.
Oracle just considers this tit-for-tat in that they are going to move into Red Hat's market if Red Hat insists on moving into theirs.
Red Hat made a business decision to grow their business in a different direction and, according to Oracle, that caused the Oracle action. It is too late now to put either genie back in the bottle.
Regardless where you stand on this issue, it should not have come as a surprise to anyone.
This might have an impact on RHEL, I don't see it having any impact on CentOS. (The cost difference between RHEL ES and the Oracle versions are not that great, at least on i386 ... and any supported oracle database is going to be on a paid OS anyway, be it Oracle or RHEL)
Thanks, Johnny Hughes
Yes, but if Red Hat takes measures to protect their sources (like taking them off-line and making them available only on-request) to slow Oracle down, it could hurt CentOS. That would be a shame...
Yes, but if Red Hat takes measures to protect their sources (like taking them off-line and making them available only on-request) to slow Oracle down, it could hurt CentOS. That would be a shame...
Not at all. rhn access would be all that's required, and centos has such accounts. If not I'm certain that we could come up with a few such accounts for donation, and be right back to business as usual. GPL protection is a wonderful thing.
On 10/26/06, Jim Perrin jperrin@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, but if Red Hat takes measures to protect their sources (like taking them off-line and making them available only on-request) to slow Oracle down, it could hurt CentOS. That would be a shame...
Not at all. rhn access would be all that's required, and centos has such accounts. If not I'm certain that we could come up with a few such accounts for donation, and be right back to business as usual. GPL protection is a wonderful thing.
Well as long as people remember to donate. Remember we are a public supported operating system, so please give, give just 10.00 a month to continue to get access to great software from Centos.
[Ok too much public radio this week.]
On 26/10/06, Stephen John Smoogen smooge@gmail.com wrote:
Well as long as people remember to donate. Remember we are a public supported operating system, so please give, give just 10.00 a month to continue to get access to great software from Centos.
Or the sad-eyed puppy gets it!
;)
Will McDonald spake the following on 10/26/2006 1:53 PM:
On 26/10/06, Stephen John Smoogen smooge@gmail.com wrote:
Well as long as people remember to donate. Remember we are a public supported operating system, so please give, give just 10.00 a month to continue to get access to great software from Centos.
Or the sad-eyed puppy gets it!
;)
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Not at all. rhn access would be all that's required, and centos has such accounts. If not I'm certain that we could come up with a few such accounts for donation, and be right back to business as usual. GPL protection is a wonderful thing.
Providing the source (as required by GPL) could be in tar.gz format. This would be adequate for GPL compliance. Nothing in the GPL states that a company is required to hand out their SRPM's and the Spec file they used, or even tell you the build environment they used to accomplish this. Thus the source RPM and Spec file that make CentOS possible could be ripped out of RHEL's offerings to clients, causing harm to CentOS.
My brother noted in the user mail list I believe that Unbreakable from Oracle appeared to have CentOS/RHEL spec files as well (I think it was CentOS actually, not RHEL but whichever). The point being is that if Oracle is using SRPM's/Spec files from RHEL or CentOS to make this Enterprise operating system I see no requirement on RedHat's part to keep providing the SRPM/Spec's if they so choose to pull those. The RHN could get you source, but again, if provided in tar.gz with no spec file, how many hours of work do you think this could bring down CentOS, or require adequate funding for developers to compensate. It would be great to hear that the funding is already their in donations to keep going (Just In Case), although that seems unlikely.
Trevor
On Mon, 2006-10-30 at 13:25 -0800, Trevor Benson wrote:
Not at all. rhn access would be all that's required, and centos has such accounts. If not I'm certain that we could come up with a few such accounts for donation, and be right back to business as usual. GPL protection is a wonderful thing.
Providing the source (as required by GPL) could be in tar.gz format. This would be adequate for GPL compliance. Nothing in the GPL states that a company is required to hand out their SRPM's and the Spec file they used, or even tell you the build environment they used to accomplish this. Thus the source RPM and Spec file that make CentOS possible could be ripped out of RHEL's offerings to clients, causing harm to CentOS.
That is not true ... here is the quote from the GPL:
"The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable."
The SRPM is the mechanism by which the binary file is produced (ie, it controls it's compilation in RHEL) and it contains pre and post install scripts that control the installation. Therefore it must be distributed to anyone who has had the binaries distributed to them if they ask.
If you legally obtain the binaries, and ask, the source code must be provided ... and in the case of an RPM based distro, that would be the SRPM. If someone is not providing that and you legally obtained the RPM as a customer, it is a violation of the GPL.
My brother noted in the user mail list I believe that Unbreakable from Oracle appeared to have CentOS/RHEL spec files as well (I think it was CentOS actually, not RHEL but whichever). The point being is that if Oracle is using SRPM's/Spec files from RHEL or CentOS to make this Enterprise operating system I see no requirement on RedHat's part to keep providing the SRPM/Spec's if they so choose to pull those. The RHN could get you source, but again, if provided in tar.gz with no spec file, how many hours of work do you think this could bring down CentOS, or require adequate funding for developers to compensate. It would be great to hear that the funding is already their in donations to keep going (Just In Case), although that seems unlikely.
As I posted above, for RPMS the SRPM must be provided.
For other distribution methods, the tar.gz file would be fine.
As for access to RHN, CentOS could obtain the SRPMS from there if Red Hat decided to to publish SRPMS to public FTP servers. (I don't see this happening any time soon, even with the Oracle issue ... that is just not how Red Hat does business).
On Mon, 30 Oct 2006, Johnny Hughes wrote:
On Mon, 2006-10-30 at 13:25 -0800, Trevor Benson wrote:
Not at all. rhn access would be all that's required, and centos has such accounts. If not I'm certain that we could come up with a few such accounts for donation, and be right back to business as usual. GPL protection is a wonderful thing.
Providing the source (as required by GPL) could be in tar.gz format. This would be adequate for GPL compliance. Nothing in the GPL states that a company is required to hand out their SRPM's and the Spec file they used, or even tell you the build environment they used to accomplish this. Thus the source RPM and Spec file that make CentOS possible could be ripped out of RHEL's offerings to clients, causing harm to CentOS.
That is not true ... here is the quote from the GPL:
"The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable."
The SRPM is the mechanism by which the binary file is produced (ie, it controls it's compilation in RHEL) and it contains pre and post install scripts that control the installation. Therefore it must be distributed to anyone who has had the binaries distributed to them if they ask.
If you legally obtain the binaries, and ask, the source code must be provided ... and in the case of an RPM based distro, that would be the SRPM. If someone is not providing that and you legally obtained the RPM as a customer, it is a violation of the GPL.
I'm mostly ignorant on these things, but wouldn't Red Hat be obliged to supply only those SRPMs used to build software released under the GPL? What about Apache, BIND, Kerberos, OpenLDAP, OpenSSH, Perl, Sendmail, SQLite, TeTeX, Vim, X.org, and others?
Non-GPL licenses account for roughly 30% of packages on a representative login server:
$ rpm -qa --qf '%{name}: %{license}\n' | grep -v GPL | wc -l 270 $ rpm -qa | wc -l 851
Not that Red Hat would do such a thing! Still, it seems to me at least legally plausible.
On Mon, 2006-10-30 at 14:45 -0800, Paul Heinlein wrote:
On Mon, 30 Oct 2006, Johnny Hughes wrote:
On Mon, 2006-10-30 at 13:25 -0800, Trevor Benson wrote:
Not at all. rhn access would be all that's required, and centos has such accounts. If not I'm certain that we could come up with a few such accounts for donation, and be right back to business as usual. GPL protection is a wonderful thing.
Providing the source (as required by GPL) could be in tar.gz format. This would be adequate for GPL compliance. Nothing in the GPL states that a company is required to hand out their SRPM's and the Spec file they used, or even tell you the build environment they used to accomplish this. Thus the source RPM and Spec file that make CentOS possible could be ripped out of RHEL's offerings to clients, causing harm to CentOS.
That is not true ... here is the quote from the GPL:
"The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable."
The SRPM is the mechanism by which the binary file is produced (ie, it controls it's compilation in RHEL) and it contains pre and post install scripts that control the installation. Therefore it must be distributed to anyone who has had the binaries distributed to them if they ask.
If you legally obtain the binaries, and ask, the source code must be provided ... and in the case of an RPM based distro, that would be the SRPM. If someone is not providing that and you legally obtained the RPM as a customer, it is a violation of the GPL.
I'm mostly ignorant on these things, but wouldn't Red Hat be obliged to supply only those SRPMs used to build software released under the GPL? What about Apache, BIND, Kerberos, OpenLDAP, OpenSSH, Perl, Sendmail, SQLite, TeTeX, Vim, X.org, and others?
Non-GPL licenses account for roughly 30% of packages on a representative login server:
$ rpm -qa --qf '%{name}: %{license}\n' | grep -v GPL | wc -l 270 $ rpm -qa | wc -l 851
Not that Red Hat would do such a thing! Still, it seems to me at least legally plausible.
For non-GPL packages, they would have to follow the specific requirements of the particular license, that is true.
For most of them, except BSD, that requires distributing the source and the things required to build the source.
They would not have to distribute the BSD items though ... that is true.
I would not worry too much about Oracle. I don't think that they will that successful with repackaging and selling the support for Linux.
Pervasive tried the same thing with PostgreSql. Everybody could download it, but people would to pay for support.
After a year, they quit and stopped providing support for PostgreSql. The official reason they gave: there is too much community support. In plain English, people did not buy their support because the PostgreSql community was too good and too responsive.
In the RH community, there are the own that are willing to pay for RedHat, these will still pay for it. The others are here!
Johnny, and all the others will embarrass Oracle. With the updates coming within hours, the mailing list, the extended repositories...
With the regular publication that Oracle can't keep up with CentOS, oracle won't stay too long in that business.
BTW, thanks for the great job that you are doing.
I couldn't believe my eyes (and ears!):
http://www.direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2006/10/24/3249.aspx
- Dan
On 27/10/06, Dan Stoner dstoner@flmnh.ufl.edu wrote:
I couldn't believe my eyes (and ears!):
http://www.direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2006/10/24/3249.aspx
Any chance of a brief summary? (And did any cute puppies get it? ;))
Will.
Will McDonald wrote:
On 27/10/06, Dan Stoner dstoner@flmnh.ufl.edu wrote:
I couldn't believe my eyes (and ears!):
http://www.direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2006/10/24/3249.aspx
Any chance of a brief summary? (And did any cute puppies get it? ;))
Will.
The first part of the video is the... humorous... part, and you have to see it for yourself (I think there is an ogg theora stream available at the link above).
The actual content portion of Michael Dell's keynote mostly had to do with consolidation onto x86 hardware, eliminating proprietary Unix, growth of Linux sales, increased "performance per watt" of the new lines of CPUs (including AMD now), partnerships between Dell and other vendors, etc.
- Dan
Dan Stoner wrote:
The first part of the video is the... humorous... part, and you have to see it for yourself (I think there is an ogg theora stream available at the link above).
Are Oracle and EMC not... vendors of proprietary software? What a bizarre black-is-white Ego trip.
-Andy
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