Oracle May Cease Support of RHEL & SUSE

[teancum144]

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/d...tives_Too.html

The more I learn about Oracle, the more convinced I am that they are a stupid, unethical company. By undermining RH, they hurt the future development of the RHEL distribution (and thus their own Unbreakable Linux distribution). Unless I'm missing something, this would be a very short-sighted decision (idiots!!).

The company I work for is an Oracle shop and I find that increasingly repugnant (I'm not a decision maker, or I would investigate switching to PostgreSQL).

[pete_1967]

Well, all Red Hat needs to do is to stop providing SRPMSs and Oracle's task to re-build RHEL just got that much harder. There'll also be lots (probably most) of companies who are happy with Oracle DB products but are not willing to change their OS for it.

[Evil_Bert]

Originally Posted by pete_1967

Well, all Red Hat needs to do is to stop providing SRPMSs and Oracle's task to re-build RHEL just got that much harder. There'll also be lots (probably most) of companies who are happy with Oracle DB products but are not willing to change their OS for it.

I acknowledge I'm not a GPL et al license guru, but AFAIK RedHat is obliged to make available SRPMs for most of their offerings to comply with the license(s) ... and most of RHEL (the base OS, not middleware) seems to be developed by projects that exist outside RH, even though RH is a (perhaps the) leading linux contributor.

There was a recent change in RH's provision of source for kernel patches, though:
http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-sour...-help-rhel-816

[pete_1967]

Originally Posted by Evil_Bert

I acknowledge I'm not a GPL et al license guru, but AFAIK RedHat is obliged to make available SRPMs for most of their offerings to comply with the license(s) ... and most of RHEL (the base OS, not middleware) seems to be developed by projects that exist outside RH, even though RH is a (perhaps the) leading linux contributor.

There was a recent change in RH's provision of source for kernel patches, though:
http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-sour...-help-rhel-816

GPL only stipulates that the source must be made available, it doesn't specify the format it must be in (apart of being machine readable). Neither you must make the source publicly available, you just must offer it to anyone who wants it and deliver it on discs for example.

RH is kind enough to provide source RPMs but they are not under any obligation to do so.

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