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To Oracle, 'Community' Means Paying Oracle Customers

Summary: Oracle continues to extend only its own distribution of GNU/Linux (which is a ripoff of another), leaving everyone else out in the cold

Oracle, the selfish company run by a selfish man (who has risen to power in part thanks to CIA help), just announced a new clone of Red Hat Linux 6.5 [1,2]. This clone is not free and it's not about Free/libre software, it is about control (by Oracle). It's merely a copy of Red Hat Linux 6.5 [3,4] and it has some Oracle-only 'features' [5]. Oracle didn't make these, it bought these from Sun.



This attitude from Oracle is not surprising. Given the way Oracle just slapped OpenOffice.org at Apache (with little or nothing done to help) [6], leaving it for people to take from there [7] and to enhance [8] amid the decline of offline word processors [9], the treatment of GNU/Linux by Oracle is not shocking. Other than btrfs, what has Oracle really done for GNU/Linux? Almost nothing. Even btrfs is hardly promoted by Oracle anymore. Let's face it. Oracle just does its own thing the proprietary way (trying to keep up with what's shareable [10] and then adding its own private extensions at the top). To Oracle, Free/libre software is a rival [11] which it is only ever willing to co-opt in order to help sell its expensive proprietary software. When it comes to Free software, Oracle is a user, not a developer. btrfs needed to be licensed like the kernel it targets.

Related/contextual items from the news:



  1. Send in the clones: Oracle, CentOS catch up to Red Hat Linux 6.5


  2. Linux Top 3: RHEL Clones Update as Linux Mint Gets a new Dash of Cinnamon
    This past week marked the final release of Linux Mint 16 codenamed 'Petra'. So far, Linux Mint has been made available in two officials builds, one with the new Cinammon 2.0 desktop and the other with MATE.


  3. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 ships, but still no RHEL 7 in sight
    Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.5 has reached general availability following a six-week beta period, making it the first minor release of RHEL 6 to ship since version 6.4 in February.


  4. Fact sheet: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5
    The latest iteration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (6.5) is now available, and it's a serious contender to usurp all other platforms as king of the enterprise space. This particular release was designed specifically to simplify the operation of mission-critical SAP applications. The new release focuses on key enterprise-specific areas....



  5. Oracle integrates DTrace debugger into its Linux distribution


  6. Apache OpenOffice 4.1 to Bring Enhanced Accessibility Support
    The Apache OpenOffice project is pleased to announce that it has successfully integrated support for the Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) and IAccessible2 interfaces. Support for these interfaces enables screen readers and other assistive technologies to work with Apache OpenOffice, which in turn enables greater productivity by OpenOffice users who are blind or who have low-vision.


  7. Stakeholders and Remixes: the other names of true communities
    This year we had a workshop dedicated to LibreOffice migrations inside the 3ctor and I spoke about what was going on in France. I was however reminded of a very important notion during my various conversations with the audience. Free Software licences pass on several rights to the users. But these rights or freedoms, while essential, do not mandate how a Free Software project community should work. If anything, that would be quite out of topic and perhaps going against the very spirit of Software Freedom. Among these freedoms, two are implied that are of particular importance but often overlooked in regard of Free Software development projects: the right to fork and the right -as a user- to leave the software or the vendor/supplier who is providing you support and services on the FOSS stack in question.


  8. LibreOffice now has a built in XML-parser


  9. Word processors are no longer central to the computing experience
    Word processors are no longer central to the computing experience, but there are still good reasons to use them. The question is, how well do the work in today's computing environment?


  10. Oracle Linux 6.5 and Docker


  11. Devil is in the details of Oracle-to-PostgreSQL migration
    EnterpriseDB execs have moved customers off Oracle, but contracts and app packages can tangle switch to PostgreSQL

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