I appreciate there's an uphill battle here to gain HN user trust. It is Oracle after all. OCI is a very different from what you've seen from Oracle in the past. It was created by ex-AWS, Azure, and GCP engineers, based on our collective experiences within those platforms. From some regards you might say we are to Oracle, what Azure was to Microsoft earlier on. A wildly different way of doing things.
Using standard / paid instances should be no more difficult or hard than using free-tier ones, other than the obvious need to have converted to a non-free account and, I believe, sorted out payment methods. They launch and run the same way, just when you have a paid account you can launch on larger instances. We've got enough things we want to do with the cloud, without having to resort to building lots of separate experiences and code paths for free tier accounts.
Disclaimer: opinion is entirely my own, may not reflect the opinions of my employers, etc.
Is Oracle going to start putting their OCI API client code into distros and get distros official accounts for distributing images etc? (Debian would be my first choice for this)
I'm not sure what the plan is for the SDKs, that's handled by a completely different team.
The SDKs are open source and can be installed fairly easily, e.g. the python sdk is up in pypi, as is the oci cli.
Vendors are welcome to sign up and start publishing images via the marketplace on our platform. That's an option available today, without specific need for OCI to engage. SuSE are in there, for example.
Using standard / paid instances should be no more difficult or hard than using free-tier ones, other than the obvious need to have converted to a non-free account and, I believe, sorted out payment methods. They launch and run the same way, just when you have a paid account you can launch on larger instances. We've got enough things we want to do with the cloud, without having to resort to building lots of separate experiences and code paths for free tier accounts.
Disclaimer: opinion is entirely my own, may not reflect the opinions of my employers, etc.