Oracle Muscles in on Linux
There's a new bad guy in town. Just when you thought that Microsoft and SCO were the only gangsters in the software world, a new player has been muscling in on their territory -- or so you'd think from reading all the hype on the Internet. Reports tend to be confused and not many people have bothered to find out the truth: so that's what I've gone out and done.
Oracle, who have been supporting their commercial database product -- um, Oracle -- on Linux since 1998, have now embraced Linux a little harder and are now going to offer operating system (OS) support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. That is, regardless of whether you're running Oracle on that machine or not. Furthermore, they promise to support versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux long after Red Hat themselves have ceased support, even though Red Hat claim to offer support for all their software for up to seven years.
The name of this project is "Unbreakable Linux" and it is not so much a separate distribution as the name given to the support program. It seems that this support program will start with RHEL 3 and it will be implemented by customers downloading a new 'up2date' program which will connect them to Oracle's update servers. A lot of confusion comes from people thinking that Oracle will be rebranding RHEL and releasing it as Unbreakable Linux, but a side effect of this support program is that they will be creating a separate distribution -- several in fact -- because they will be doing so many code updates. It will inevitably get messy, but Oracle's aim is to maintain compatibility with Red Hat Linux. Every new version that Red Hat release will be synchronised with Oracle's code base. Every change they make on their own, however, will take them farther away from Red Hat's original code making more work for their integration long term.
Of course, Oracle have already been fiddling with Linux for years and they have already made several major contributions including the Oracle Cluster File System which is a part of the Linux kernel as of version 2.6.16, so they already have a team of developers dedicated to Linux work.
To rub salt in Red Hat's wound, until 31st of January 2007, Oracle are going to be offering their support program at a 50% discount for new customers, and completely free for existing customers.
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