Reports of Red Hat's death at Oracle's hand are premature
Submitted by srlinuxx on Thu, 10/26/2006 - 14:11.
Is it just me, or is Oracle biting off more than it can chew with its foray into the land of Linux support services? In one corner, we have a finely-coiffed prince with a rapper's ego, Larry Ellison, and his database empire. In the other, we have Red Hat: almost synonymous with Linux, especially in the business world, and long a pillar of the free/open source community.
The story has been shape-shifting as it wends its way through the press. At first it was widely speculated that Oracle was about to introduce its own distribution. Now, after Ellison's announcement at Oracle OpenWorld, it seems that Oracle will simply try to steal a slice of Red Hat's pie by offering support services for the Red Hat distribution.
Oracle is just defensive on RedHat ?
Most Linux distros are using official kernels as released by Linus and Andrew. which means the projects of most applications for Linux is compliant and bug fixing is easy. Compilation of packages are smoother.
RedHat on the other hand continues to attempt backward compatibility to perhaps RedHat 7,2 version. so, the Linux kernel had many builds, 2137 last time I looked.
The support is tedious at best. So, to defend the use of Oracle on redHat, Oracle can no long lose business if RedHat has any mishaps. Oracle had to help themselves by doing the support cheaper. And Oracle had to offer a RedHat version locked downed for Oracle 10g. Thus, Jefferies and company downgraded RedHat.
I would not say that Oracle is predating, but defensive for their business on RedHat operating systems for self preservation. they have to support also Ubuntu and Novell, etc.(all the Linux distros even Mepis).
Red Hat Accuses Oracle of Forking Linux Code Base
In an almost self-contradictory response on its corporate Web site today, Linux producer Red Hat attempted to demonstrate that it was still partnered with its leading database producer, Oracle, while at the same time pummeling it with criticism over its plan announced just this morning to offer competitive product support contracts for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Red Hat's semi-padded counter-offensive leads off with the phrase, "Unfakeable Linux," plastered over its home page - a clear shot across the bow at Oracle's new "Unbreakable Linux" program, if not an all-out broadside.
But the second sentence of its official response retracts the guns and extends the olive branch: "Oracle's support for Linux reaffirms Red Hat's technical industry leadership and the end of proprietary Unix," it reads. Later, it goes on: "Red Hat will continue to work closely with Oracle to optimize Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss middleware subscriptions for Oracle products, and to support joint customers."
Full Story.
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You talk the talk, but do you waddle the waddle?
Knocking Off Red Hat
Give Larry Ellison credit for candor: He hasn't been keeping his open source strategy to himself. Earlier this summer, he told Forbes that he had no interest in buying Red Hat , the open source support company.
“Open source intellectual property is available to all of us. What that means is that any company can take the Red Hat (nasdaq: RHAT - news - people ) version of Linux and use it at no cost so long as they’re willing to support themselves,” he said while sitting at his Woodside, Calif., estate.
He continued: “Well, that actually includes us. We could take the Red Hat Linux as long as we’re willing to support it. In fact, we can redistribute it to others and provide support. So why would we buy Red Hat Linux, when we can just take it for nothing?”
Full Story.
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You talk the talk, but do you waddle the waddle?
What to make of Oracle vs. Red Hat?
The tremors from Oracle's recent decision to support its own version of Red Hat Linux less expensively than Red Hat does are still being felt in the Linux community.
Red Hat's official statement is that, "The opportunity for open source just got bigger. Oracle's announcement further validates Red Hat's technical leadership. We will continue to optimize Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Oracle and compete on value and innovation."
On Red Hat's site, though, the Linux company comes out swinging. In a section entitled, Unfakeable Linux points out a laundry list of what's wrong with Oracle's Unbreakable Linux. This includes no support for the Red Hat Application Stack; no guarantees of hardware or software compatibility; and, invoking that swear-word of Linux circles: Oracle will "fork" the RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) code.
Does Red Hat have reason to take this so seriously?
Full Story.
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You talk the talk, but do you waddle the waddle?
What is the lowdown on Oracle ?
Oracle is a killer application which any operating system can use. Sun has more revenue than RedHat, and can promote Oracle better. Jonathan Schwartz was the speaker just before Ellison made the final speech at the Oracle sponsored meeting. Is that the lowdown?
RedHat has Jboss and is themselves building a stack of killer applications. If RedHat spend some time building MySQL to ERP level; the competition would be fierce.
But RedHat needed Jboss's sales force to be build up for growth. This saga has yet to be played out in a few years.
But we all know the huge market is the public or private e-market. Everyone is planning their won share of this huge world wide global e-market.