[Oracle] Keep Linux Open and Free - We Can’t Afford Not To

It is strange ... I've never thought the day would come that I'd agree with Oracle. On the other hand, this could be just a good example of "never letting a crisis go to waste". Is there a chance for Oracle to pick up the pieces and release a new CentOS? ;-)

Oracle has been part of the Linux community for 25 years. Our goal has remained the same over all those years: help make Linux the best server operating system for everyone, freely available to all, with high-quality, low-cost support provided to those who need it.

Our Linux engineering team makes significant contributions to the kernel, file systems, and tools. We push all that work back to mainline so that every Linux distribution can include it. We are proud those contributions are part of the reason Linux is now so very capable, benefiting not just Oracle customers, but all users.

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" Red Hat, thousands of people spend their time writing code to enable new features, fixing bugs, integrating different packages and then supporting that work for a long time … We have to pay the people to do that work." - Red Hat

Oracle: Interesting. IBM doesn’t want to continue publicly releasing RHEL source code because it has to pay its engineers? That seems odd, given that Red Hat as a successful independent open source company chose to publicly release RHEL source and pay its engineers for many years before IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019 for $34 billion.

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As for Oracle, we will continue pursuing our goal for Linux as transparently and openly as we always have while minimizing fragmentation. We will continue to develop and test our software products on Oracle Linux. Oracle Linux will continue to be RHEL compatible to the extent we can make it so. In the past, Oracle’s access to published RHEL source has been important for maintaining that compatibility. From a practical standpoint, we believe Oracle Linux will remain as compatible as it has always been through release 9.2, but after that, there may be a greater chance for a compatibility issue to arise. If an incompatibility does affect a customer or ISV, Oracle will work to remediate the problem.

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

Oracle underscores its commitment to helping keep Linux open and free for the global Linux community.