Oracle stands for "One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison"
this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
592 points (95.7% liked)
Linux
47290 readers
2358 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Damn. Gotta save this one.
I always heard the R stood for Rich
Is it raging or rich?
yes
I’ll never forgive them for destroying Sun
They tried to wreck Android also.
Google a few years later: Hold my beer.
Sun Solaris is where I really learned to use *nix. In college my department had a whole computer lab filled with Sun workstations. Definitely a more interesting place than all the standard windows clusters.
I have never used this Oracle Solaris business.
Never again. Twice I’ve been at fast-growing startups that went with Oracle, and both times it was the worst mistake the business made.
What happened?
It's not difficult to guess: they got EA'd. IBM'd. FaceBook'd. Their startup got bought up, hollowed out, and dissolved. All in the name of killing off competition and padding staff rolls.
I've found many startups are merely "investments" by some entrepreneur that were intended from inception, whether explicitly or not, to be grown to a sufficiently negotiable state and sold to the biggest buyer. That's not to say that big tech companies don't buy-out their competition, but many startups also dream of being bought-out.
chasing the exit is a common strategy
I wish he'd respond. But from my experience, Oracle sells you a license that's just what you need, nothing more. They do so on good terms to get you in the door. Then when you rely on their database they jack up the rates and start ridiculous pricing strategies that either force you to rearchitect away from Oracle entirely or sacrifice your ability to use their product and force you to work around their license.
Oracle doesn't have customers, it has hostages.
This is an enemy of my enemy case.
It makes sense to trust Oracle in this instance as they stand to lose if IBM has sole control over enterprise Linux.
However, remember that as soon as the profit motive is gone, Oracle's support will also vanish.
There is no universe in which Oracle is doing the right thing. In all the myriad multiverse, Oracle is never the good guy. Ever.
In this case specifically, they are doing the right thing, but for all the wrong reasons.
You're right. Oracle is definitely not the good guy here, it's just that their goals happen to align right now.
Forgive me for not cheering so long as they are fighting outside of a literal gladiatorial ring.
Until then, the chance of collateral damage is far too great.
They destroy everything they touch...
I am only happy for the damaged they made to MySQL popularity. ;-)
Which one do you prefer then? Choose carefully.
Postgres
You have chosen wisely
MariaDB is pretty cool though. They've continued to innovate in the space and have some truthfully dope features. Like being able to create an index against a arbitrary json path of a json column.
"Oracle" sounds like they were trying to be as dystopian cyberpunk as possible when naming their company.
I trust Oracle... to find a way to charge me an arm and a leg and a spleen for basic functionality.
No way I'm ever gonna trust a company that is chasing profits
Don't trust any publicly traded company, once a business has completed it's IPO it's owned shareholders and led by a CEO legally obligated to chase profits as the primary objective. Corporations spend money on PR and brand marketing to make us think otherwise, but under US law it's crystal clear they only chase profits.
It's kinda sickening to hear people say they "love" Apple, Amazon, Netflix, etc... These corporations derive their "right" to exist from one of the most horrible miscarriages of justice in history. The 14th Amendment was put into law to grant the rights of citizenship to freed slaves after the US Civil War in an effort to abolish a system created by greedy oligarchs to profit from the suffering of others. Unfortunately, the conservative Justices on the US Supreme Court decided in 1886 that a new system could be created to allow greedy oligarchs to profit from the labor of others. That ruling was called Corporate personhood.
Full disclosure, as a computer nerd in the 1990's, I really did fall in love with Google, it seemed it represent everything Apple and Microsoft did not. Back in the Pre-IPO days between 1998-2004 Google engineered some of the most useful and innovative services on the Internet for consumers. Now I view Alphabet Inc as possibly the most dangerous corporation in the realm of technology. Relentlessly striving to control the Internet through DRM tech like Widevine, the AMP framework, and proliferating a Surveillance Capitalist strategy to target everyone online, track them across the Internet and harvest their data for profit.
I do have some faith in companies like Valve and System76 because they are privately owned and do not always act in a "profits above all else" mentality.
Your first paragraph about only profit mattering isn’t even hyperbole.
I’m a computer nerd just like many here, but I went to business school too. There’s no “haha screw the consumers” snickering when you learn about business administration. It’s a simple well-meaning concept that the goal of going into business is to make money for the owners who invested their own money into the company.
Private companies are one thing, but then once they go public, a whole new set of rules and circumstances occur. The “owners” are a nebulous cloud of faceless investors & institutions, many (most?) of whom don’t give a shit about the company itself, just the risk/return and asset category it represents.
The C-suite has a fiduciary duty to make that money for those shareholders, plus those individuals generally have to own a bunch of stock in order to further align their priorities with profit and share price. You don’t want the investing community to see that you had a chance to double profits this year and didn’t take it, which can lead to the short-sighted decision making we see so often. Plus driving up the share price short term makes you yourself able to cash out and diversify a bit.
No one's a good guy.
TBH, the likes of oracle are probably what led to this. Rocky/Alma weren't seeking profit, and neither did CentOS before it was turned into kinda stable Fedora.
Exactly, people seem to think the Rocky/CIQ contract with NASA was the breaker but that was peanuts, we all know it was Oracle.
And this is why I choose Debian...
And this is why I choose Debian…
You mean the distribution where Canonical has in the past outright bought votes to align Debian closer to Ubuntu? If you think I'm making shit up, look up the fiasco that led to the insanely protracted (roughly a year) very public debate about making Upstart the default init system. Here's a tldr from a German IT website:
Besides SysV Init, which is currently used by Debian, there is Systemd, which is mainly developed by Red Hat, Canonical's own Upstart, and OpenRC, which is developed by Gentoo. Only Systemd and Upstart are believed to have a chance. It is unlikely that SysV Init will remain, OpenRC cannot keep up with Upstart or Systemd in terms of technology and innovation. More and more Linux distributions are turning to Systemd, while Upstart is currently used exclusively by Canonical, after Red Hat used it for RHEL 6 and Fedora 9, but is relying on Systemd for RHEL 7.
The two committee members who have already made their opinions known are former Canonical employee Ian Jackson and Russ Allbery. While Jackson favors Upstart, Allbery is clearly in favor of Systemd. Two other members, Colin Watson and Steve Langasek, both employed by Canonical, will probably only support Upstart. The other members are Don Armstrong, Andreas Barth and Keith Packard, newly elected to the committee, as well as chairman Bdale Garbee.
Original: https://www.pro-linux.de/news/1/20622/debatte-um-das-init-system-bei-debian-8-h%C3%A4lt-an.html Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version).
It's now less public but Canonical still has its tentacles in Debian with Snap and such.
Debian is 100% community run, it cannot "have tentacles" in it. There is no leader that takes the choices that can be influenced.
I just hope that SUSE keeps them in check for now.
If it weren't for VirtualBox I would avoid them all together. It's just so damned convenient though.
Kvm/qemu is really good too you should try it out or is there special feature holding you back on virtualbox?
Do you still have to reboot the VM to connect an USB device?
No
i mine monero on their servers
Shoutout to oracle for hosting the only xonotic server in India running right now!
I have noticed they did something in open source? But I don't know what. Somebody got a link or sum where i can find info on what happened
I think this is about the formation of the Open Enterprise Linux Association, which Oracle is a founding member of.
I understand what you're going for, but they have made a really amazing and powerful contribution with the OpenSPARC project, which supplies the hardware description files and EXTENSIVE documentation of the micro architecture, component layout, etc. of probably the two most powerful free/libre and open-source multi-core processors ever assembled, the UltraSPARC T1 and UltraSPARC T2. And this was released under the GNU General Public License. This is almost unbelievable, as hardware is still almost completely unfree. Sure, there are some PCBs and microcontrollers like those distributed by Arduino or Raspberry Pi, but the chip source for the processors on all of these is mostly proprietary. Regarding microprocessors, there are VERY FEW actual hardware designs available that are free/libre and open-source, and OpenSPARC is one of them. Granted, the UltraSPARC T1 and UltraSPARC T2 were released to the public when Sun Microsystems was still an independent company and before they were acquired by Oracle, but Oracle is still keeping the webpages of the OpenSPARC project up! For hardware designers that aspire to make free/libre and open-source hardware, this is an invaluable resource!
Having some being worse makes yourself good... Because we are living in a binary world 😉