From a practical standpoint, we believe Oracle Linux will remain as compatible as it has always been through release 9.2, but after that, there may be a greater chance for a compatibility issue to arise. If an incompatibility does affect a customer or ISV, Oracle will work to remediate the problem.
This is the part of the post I find most interesting. Looks like Oracle won’t be engaging in whatever workarounds Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux are using to continue operating as downstream distros of RHEL. Instead, if I’m reading this correctly it means Oracle Linux will essentially be forking from RHEL past 9.2. There were essentially three options before Oracle when Red Hat made their license change:
Pay Red Hat for RHEL licenses. Lol as if, Larry Ellison didn’t become a billionaire by spending money he didn’t need to.
Use whatever workarounds to remain a downstream distro and pay Red Hat nothing, while using their army of lawyers to fend off any ensuing lawsuits from Red Hat / IBM. It’s not like they couldn’t afford to fight the case after all.
Fork from Red Hat.
That they’ve chosen the third options is kind of fascinating to me, and to understand why you’d probably need to understand how enterprise database support works. The Oracle databases I see day to day are massive, and they drive practically all of a company’s core operations. Unanticipated downtime is fucking expensive, so these companies are willing to pay a lot for top-tier support (not like I think Oracle Support is actually good, mind you, but that’s a whole other topic). The DBAs running these databases don’t want to deal with any headaches whatsoever, so they’re only going to install Oracle on approved operating systems. They can’t afford to have Oracle say “nope, sorry, unsupported platform” during an outage.
For a couple decades now, the supported Linux platforms for Oracle Database have been RHEL, SLES and Oracle Linux. Obviously Oracle Linux will remain on that list, and I doubt SLES is going anywhere either (it tends to be popular in Europe), but does RHEL drop off the list in future? Does Oracle think they can actually convert RHEL installs to Oracle Linux installs at customer sites? Or does RHEL stay on the list but become the red-headed step-child? Either way, this feels like an attempt by Oracle to erode the value of Red Hat’s platform. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.
I also did not expect the fork. I thought they would slime their way forward and use Oracle’s army of lawyers against IBM.
But now I expect new RHEL releases to become unsupported in the next database LTS release, 23c. All the customers on RHEL will probably migrate to Oracle Linux on their next upgrade, even if Red Hat support is better you don’t want to be unsupported on critical systems because you’ll have no one to blame when the shit hits the fan.
I was actually kind of hoping for the second option, if only so that it would be Oracle footing the legal bill to establish a precedent. That Oracle didn’t choose this option may indicate that Red Hat’s coercive license wrapper (“if you exercise your open source rights to redistribute, we’ll close your account”) is actually an effective and legal end-run around open source licenses. I don’t want that to be the case.
Yeah the historical precedents were all Oracle giving Red Hat the finger and Red Hat going “sure, we won’t go after you” because… well… would you wanna get into a lawsuit war with Oracle? They look at the legal system as a revenue stream.
I totally wouldn’t/do not expect an Oracle fork. I expected they’d just continue on as always. That’s probably also bad news for Red Hat tbh.
This is the part of the post I find most interesting. Looks like Oracle won’t be engaging in whatever workarounds Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux are using to continue operating as downstream distros of RHEL. Instead, if I’m reading this correctly it means Oracle Linux will essentially be forking from RHEL past 9.2. There were essentially three options before Oracle when Red Hat made their license change:
That they’ve chosen the third options is kind of fascinating to me, and to understand why you’d probably need to understand how enterprise database support works. The Oracle databases I see day to day are massive, and they drive practically all of a company’s core operations. Unanticipated downtime is fucking expensive, so these companies are willing to pay a lot for top-tier support (not like I think Oracle Support is actually good, mind you, but that’s a whole other topic). The DBAs running these databases don’t want to deal with any headaches whatsoever, so they’re only going to install Oracle on approved operating systems. They can’t afford to have Oracle say “nope, sorry, unsupported platform” during an outage.
For a couple decades now, the supported Linux platforms for Oracle Database have been RHEL, SLES and Oracle Linux. Obviously Oracle Linux will remain on that list, and I doubt SLES is going anywhere either (it tends to be popular in Europe), but does RHEL drop off the list in future? Does Oracle think they can actually convert RHEL installs to Oracle Linux installs at customer sites? Or does RHEL stay on the list but become the red-headed step-child? Either way, this feels like an attempt by Oracle to erode the value of Red Hat’s platform. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.
I also did not expect the fork. I thought they would slime their way forward and use Oracle’s army of lawyers against IBM.
But now I expect new RHEL releases to become unsupported in the next database LTS release, 23c. All the customers on RHEL will probably migrate to Oracle Linux on their next upgrade, even if Red Hat support is better you don’t want to be unsupported on critical systems because you’ll have no one to blame when the shit hits the fan.
I was actually kind of hoping for the second option, if only so that it would be Oracle footing the legal bill to establish a precedent. That Oracle didn’t choose this option may indicate that Red Hat’s coercive license wrapper (“if you exercise your open source rights to redistribute, we’ll close your account”) is actually an effective and legal end-run around open source licenses. I don’t want that to be the case.
Yeah the historical precedents were all Oracle giving Red Hat the finger and Red Hat going “sure, we won’t go after you” because… well… would you wanna get into a lawsuit war with Oracle? They look at the legal system as a revenue stream.
I totally wouldn’t/do not expect an Oracle fork. I expected they’d just continue on as always. That’s probably also bad news for Red Hat tbh.
Frankly as a layman I don’t see any other reason than Oracle DB support to not just use good old Debian and forget about this licencing bullshit.