Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To

Re:Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To by whartung on Monday July 10, 2023 @12:17PM (#36668502)

And to be fair, Oracle has been a remarkably good steward of Java. It's truly amazing how fast and far Java has come since the Java 7 and Java 8 days. It's been on a rocket sled of development, while still being shockingly well behaved for earlier code. If there's any critique, it's "too fast". But that's nonsense, since the LTS work helps maintain stability.

And it's pretty wide open. They keep some things close to their vest, which is their prerogative, but even some of that stuff has been opening up over time as well.

It's not been a seamless transition, but it's not been awful either. Developers are managing.

It could have been far, far worse.

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Re:Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To by josephcsible on Monday July 10, 2023 @12:52PM (#36669095)

> Oracle has been a remarkably good steward of Java

Well, other than ramming through modules and the --add-opens fiasco from Java 9.

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Re:Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To by musicale on Monday July 10, 2023 @07:58PM (#36674756)

And that stupid lawsuit.

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Re:Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To by vram22 on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @03:45AM (#36677717)

What was the issue about modules?

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Re:Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To by josephcsible on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @04:43PM (#36686960)

The point of using setAccessible with reflection was to access private fields and methods, and the module features in Java 9 made that impossible without passing a gigantic list of command-line flags to every invocation of Java.

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Re:Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To by JohnFen on Monday July 10, 2023 @12:56PM (#36669151)

How Oracle handles Java (business-wise, not in technological terms) is one of the things that tells me that Oracle is still the toxic company it's always been.

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Re:Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To by delfinom on Monday July 10, 2023 @01:17PM (#36669492)

They also buried a call home into the VBox Guest Extensions and eventually started sending legal demands to companies as well. Because while VBox was open license, the VBox Guest Extensions have a non-commercial use license by default but that doesn't stop VBox from asking you to install them innocently on the first run.

Also 3 years ago, the guy in charge of a Oracle database we had (now migrated to MSSQL) accidentally downloaded the wrong Oracle database software from their portal. It turns out Oracle just lets you download any variant in their portal and then just send you legal demands for payment when you accidentally use a higher tier than you licensed. Something they can absolutely fix themselves to prevent. Of course we told them to fuck off since we didn't use any feature specific to the other tier and deployed the correct variant.

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Re:Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To by chasil on Monday July 10, 2023 @03:13PM (#36671475)

Assuming that you are using the Standard Edition/2 of the database, this is licensed at $17,500/core. On x86, there is a 2-for-1 core discount.

If you download Enterprise Edition and use it to perform an upgrade from your SE2 database, then you will then be on the hook for the full $47,500/core.

There are two ways to undo this license change. a) Run "catdwgrd.sql" to get back to the SE2 release, then upgrade again with the correct license, or b) unload all of the data in the database (via exp/imp or data pump), then load it into a new database that is created with the correct license.

Staying on an EE database will certainly place you on the new pricing tier.

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Re:Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To by lproven on Tuesday July 11, 2023 @07:55AM (#36679707)

> They also buried a call home into the VBox Guest Extensions

This is incorrect and actively misleading, because you are conflating 2 different things.

The Virtualbox Guest Additions are 100% FOSS and are included in many distros, including Ubuntu -- `apt install -y virtualbox-guest-x11` -- as well as being an optional extra with VirtualBox itself as an ISO file.

E.g. https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/7.0.8/VBoxGuestAd...

The Virtualbox Extension Pack is a proprietary optional extra.

https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/7.0.8/Oracle_VM_V...

There is no such thing as the "Guest Extensions".

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Re:Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To by binkHN on Monday July 10, 2023 @12:59PM (#36669214)

Couldn’t agree with this more—though I wasn’t a fan of their lawsuit against Google for how Java was used in Android.

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Re:Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To by stcroixx on Monday July 10, 2023 @01:05PM (#36669294)

If my choices for Linux end up IBM or Oracle, I’ll pick Oracle.

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Re:Keep Linux Open and Free–We Can’t Afford Not To by timbit42 on Monday July 10, 2023 @01:41PM (#36669964)

You will have more than two options so there is no need to choose either of those two.

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