oracle unbreakable Linux is now free and oracle advertise it as a better free alternative to centos.

it will be way cool if linode will add the support to this new free distro.

here a script to switch from centos to oracle Linux.
http://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/

please share your opinion if you try it out.

I wouldn't touch anything Ellison has his greedy fingers in with a 10 meter yacht.

_________________
Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

No. Just no. Nothing made by 'One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison'. Ever.

_________________
/ Peter

Being rich isn't a crime, just FYI.

can't believe at this kind of replyes. I will ask the same question on a more "is pirated" forum.

sblantipodi,
The problem is that Oracle's business practices aren't consumer friendly, and their stance against open source has been aggressive. Trusting Oracle not to change the rules regarding an open source product under their control is gambling plain and simple. Gambling with your installations, gambling with your sites & services, and gambling with your client's investment in you.

There's an old saying "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." It doesn't take an oracle to see the potential hazards of entrusting your fate to the whims of a corporation with Oracle's track record.

No clue what a "is pirated" forum is.

Go ask on a RedHat forum what they think of Oracle using their source code to create a copy of RedHat so that Oracle can sell support contracts.

At least CentOS and Scientific Linux are free and not leaching off RedHat in a commercial way AND they provide bug reports and patches to the upstream vendor.

Oracle just takes and takes and takes and gives nothing back.

Unless you're already a HUGE Oracle customer, why would anyone be dumb enough to trust their setup to a company known to screw over open source whenever it makes them a buck?

_________________
Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

>> Go ask on a RedHat forum what they think of Oracle using their source code to create a copy of RedHat so that Oracle can sell support contracts.


CentOS does this too, Red Hat is GPL, do you think they magically wrote all that stuff?

>> At least CentOS and Scientific Linux are free and not leaching off RedHat in a commercial way AND they provide bug reports and patches to the upstream vendor.

http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/027617.pdf

"Oracle Linux is an open source operating system available under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and other open source licenses. It is available for free download ."

>> Oracle just takes and takes and takes and gives nothing back.

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/serve ... 89636.html

Don't trust anything opensource done by Oracle. Have people not learned by now, after OpenSolaris, Java, MySQL, etc? Use opensource Oracle software, get burned. Thank goodness the OpenZFS people came along to take over ZFS from Oracle.

Maybe I like to believe there's good in people including those running megacorps.

I'm sure there is. But Oracle has burned people trusting their opensource projects at least three times in a row now, to expect any different this time is foolish and irresponsible.

You can "believe" whatever you want (with Santa's approval), but don't confuse "belief" with "facts".

In this case, your "belief" that rich people and their pseudo-people mega corps are good deep down is completely unfounded by historical facts. In a strata full of more money then they can possible spend in 10 lifetimes, it's the rare do-gooder that makes the news, while the majority of egonauts not only don't use their immense wealth to help the world, humanity, or even their neighbors, they do their best to hoard even more money by not paying their fair share of taxes.

There is absolutely nothing to admire about these folks, and I can't imagine your motives for standing up for them.

_________________
Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

Once again, being rich, aiming to be rich are not wrong morally or legally. What anyone does with their 1 dollar or 1 billion dollars is their own business. I'm not sticking up for anyone, I'm challenging yours and Guspaz's hand waiving.

I don't plan to switch to Oracle Linux because it's an RPM based distribution and RPM based distros, Red Hat, SuSE and Fedora have all mucked up my repos when using them. When I can and as much as I can I run Ubuntu (a Debian based distribution - although starting with Unity I keep thinking about moving to plain Debian).

Since there are people on Linode who like RPM based distributions then for their sake please provide citations showing why they shouldn't try or request Linode to support Oracle's Linux in your view.

Note that a citation is not, "he's rich so flip him".

In an effort to stay away from the "Oracle is bad on principle" I'm going to speak about my organization and why we support OEL:

So at my workplace we are converting a lot of our existing RHEL servers over to OEL. There are a few reasons...

- In our experience RedHat's support is lackluster compared to what we have with Oracle.
- We're already a big Oracle customer (Databases, Business Intelligence, PLM, etc) and it is one less vendor to manage a relationship with.
- Most of our Linux servers are running Oracle RDBMS and OEL already includes the kernel modules for ASM, etc.

I'm don't want to get into a discussion about whether or not we made a mistake. From what I've seen during my time at this company we're very happy with the solution and haven't had any significant issues with it.

I'm not saying that Oracle's commercial products aren't good, or that they don't offer good support services. Only that they have a proven track record of buying opensource software (or buying companies offering opensource software), and then commercializing it to the detriment of opensource users. They got MySQL and started making most new development work commercial, leaving opensource users high and dry (luckily we got MariaDB as a fork). They got OpenSolaris, and stopped publishing the source and shut down all the community sites and repositories (luckily we got OpenIndiana). They got ZFS and started restricting updates to commercial Solaris (luckily we got OpenZFS, which is actually now more advanced than Oracle's variant). They got Java, and proceeded to try to sue out of existence anybody using it that wasn't using their controlled environment (see the Google lawsuit).

Oracle is a perfectly good choice for a business willing to pay them for commercial services, but they're a terrible choice for opensource projects.