CIQ, Oracle and SUSE today announced their intent to form the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA), a collaborative trade association to encourage the development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by providing open and free Enterprise Linux (EL) source code.
The formation of OpenELA arises from Red Hat’s recent changes to RHEL source code availability. In response, CIQ, Oracle and SUSE are collaborating to deliver source code, tools and systems through OpenELA for the community.
Good initiative, except for the involvement of Oracle. I understand why they are part of this endeavour, but I see Oracle as entirely antithetical to open source and everything it stands for, so seeing them weasel their way into this debate pretending to be a good guy feels unpleasant.
Completely agree with Thom. Had it been the RedHat clones-and-alikes, I’d completely support it. SuSE is a bit weird to have in, but I guess it makes sort-of-sense. But having Oracle join, it completely loses my interest — and, I guess, the interest of many people long involved with free software development (and ethos).
Yeah, the inclusion of Oracle sours the whole thing… they have proven over, and over though the years that they can’t be trusted with open source. Killing OpenSolaris, predatory Oracle licensing, Oracle hammering on US Govt contracts that there is no room for Open Source in federal applications,
These quotes from Oracle itself sum up Oracle…
* “Oracle is a profit-seeking corporation, not a peace-loving charity” — Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle
* “If an open-source product gets good enough, we’ll simply take it” — Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle
* “Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane… We don’t have to fight open source, we have to exploit open source.” — Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle
After 20 years in IT, I know better than to do anything except push Oracle out of organizations at all cost.
LoL! I remember going to an Oracle conference some years back. One of the sessions they were extolling the virtues of open source. “We love open source!” Yeah, right…
Yes, I’ve been to conferences with random Oracle engineers. Nice people as individuals, I felt bad for the amount of verbal abuse they got from other attendees. They banded together with the AOL , Comcast and Microsoft guys for protection. Good people all but their companies kind of suck dealing with.
I think the explosion of Centos as a RHEL clone is teaching more of us to be as distro agnostic as possible. Which is painful so often. Lest anyone think otherwise Ubuntu is Awful in many ways as well. Red hat does amazing things both open and not open. As does Microsoft, and Facebook and Google. They all suck in their own unique way.
Is it just me or is this basically the end of Red Hat Linux 9 all over again. History rhyming and all that.
With Thom, and all these comments here, I have nothing to say.
After a few minutes of thinking about it. I see Oracle and Suse are in there for, for Financial and Legal backing in th eUS and Europe. CIQ , while a great grassroots, isnt big wnough for the financial or legal support IMO.
While SUSE will always hold a special place in my heart. This initiative feels a lot like another SUSE led one. United Linux. Which, lest we forget, had the same aims. It obviously imploded when one of its members went on a bit of a legal self immolation, SCO.
I think the other thing that bothers me is the premise that it’s built on. Red Hat Dominate enterprise Linux. And instead of offering a product that is better or that offers what customers want, their idea is to copy the leader and get a % of the money for their work.