Oracle Looks At Buying Novell

Several readers wrote to note Larry Ellison's comments about launching an Oracle Linux Distro (great! yet another!) and that Oracle has/is also looking at purchasing Novell. The great shake-out continues.

Comments

oracle tuned

[iggymanz]

RedHat and SuSE are the usual "enterprise" distros that have tweaks for running Oracle, but Redhat dominates. wonder how threatened RedHat would be if Oracle bought and pushed SuSE. Oracle has had a problem in the past four years of trying to make integrated features that really were best left to third party, like for example oracle filesystem and oracle clustering, which are shakier and more trouble to admin than 3rd party.

FT and eweek links

[Anonymous Coward]

FT link

eweek.com link

Re:Not another distribution.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Gentoo and Ubuntu ought to be enough for anyone. That's it. No more corporate Linuxes.

What?

What about Debian? (Ubuntu would have trouble without debian to fork every six months)

What about Redhat? (They sponsor alot of stuff that goes into both Gentoo and Ubuntu)

The great thing about linux is that people can go and do their own thing as much as they want - who cares if there's another distro - all the good bits will be ported back to Distro-you-use (tm).

Frankly, I think Oracle Linux would be great (even if I'd never use it). Loads of corporations are vaguely interested in linux to run oracle on to save on the costs of Sun Hardware. An oracle CD they just pop into their drive, where everything just works would make life easier for them and smooth corporate acceptance of other OSS.

Re:XANDROS would be a much better buy

[filesiteguy]

Well, I'd disagree with your (otherwise valid) reasoning for one issue - Novell has a world-class network admin software (Zen, I believe) and a whole host of people still running NetWare. I think from an Oracle perspective, that would be more tasty than a desktop like Xandros (which I haven't honestly tried) that is percieved to be more of a home-based system.

Re:Apples & Oranges

[wtansill]

I don't think their goal is to get rid of Microsoft, per say. When you buy an automobile, you have the choices ranging from sedans to minivans to heavy duty trucks. Does the Ford F350 really "compete" with a Honda Civic?

I think you miss the point. The reason that M$ has been wildly successful ("success" being defined by the fact that they own > 90% of the desktop space) is that they came out with a standard way to interface with the underlying system (yeah, I know -- 16/32 bit API's. Still...). To my knowledge, Linux hasn't achieved that. Part of that is by design -- the folks who do Suse have a different vison than the folks who do say, Mandrake. Still, if you want to dislodge M$ and have far greater desktop penetration, you need to have a standard to which various vendors can write.

If I'm missing something, please feel free to enlighten me.

Not quite...

[foreverdisillusioned]

As far as I know, the Ubuntu foundation operates independently of Canonical, Ltd. Canonical could pull all support for Ubuntu in favor of Ubuntu Enterprise Edition (a la Red Hat), but free Ubuntu would live on because Canonical can't take away the Ubuntu Foundation's $10,000,000+ war chest.

You should also note the grandparent's use of the word corporate. Red Hat is indeed a publically traded corporation, while Canonical is a privately held Limited Partnership. There's a big difference between those two when it comes to legal rights, shareholder obligations, and overall evil-ness.

Re:Another Distro?

[saleenS281]

driver crap isn't true? That's funny, my linksys/cisco card won't load on linux without using windows drivers, and it's till a crapshoot at best going about it that way.

If I had a PowerBook G4, I'd load OSX onto it. If I had a Sun 10000E I'd load Solaris onto it, and you can bet your ass everyone else who bought one will too. Last I checked, when you drop 6 figures on a server you want support.

That being said, your point is moot. Knowing I can run linux on a powerbook doesn't chang ethe fact my wireless doesn't work for shit. YOU are all that is wrong with linux right now. Instead of saying "hey, you're right, that's a problem we really need to fix" it's "well f you, that doesn't matter it's not important because of this and this and this". Stop patting yourself on the back, and stop trying to brush a serious problem under the rug. I can only be happy people like yourself aren't running the show or linux would've never made it out of Linus's dorm room.

Re:Novell's new tagline

[kimvette]

What would be interesting is if Novell, MySQL, and Trolltech were to merge.

Out of the distributions I like SuSE the best, and here's why:

  - Quickest time to get to real work

  - It's as close to plug & play as the distributions come

  - It uses fairly recent kernels

  - Its KDE configuration out of the box is the best I've seen

  - If you're into Gnome, it has a full Gnome configuration as well (I hate Gnome but my KDE is configured such that it looks like a mix of OS X and Gnome - what I hate about Gnome is the developers dumbed it down so much it removed any flexibility I need/want, and when I sit novices down at Gnome and KDE, they're invariably lost in Gnome. Windows and even MacOS have trained them to expect more functionality)

  - The retail version comes with a fairly good selection of packages

  - YaST is a dream for desktop configurations. On servers I use it for only package management but on desktops I primarily rely on YaST. For servers I go straight to the config files.

Ubuntu is my second favorite right now. Mandriva used to be, but not any more. Ubuntu has matured a lot since I first tried it.

Debian? Even though Ubuntu is a fork of Debian, I despise Debian - it's so out of date that I find a lot of machines won't even boot the install disc. I know a lot of people swear by Debian, but if it won't support the 915 and newer chipsets, it's not even an option. I haven't even attempted it on an nForce chipset but I'm sure that if it failed on even a now-outdated Intel 915 chipset, it won't be too friendly on the newer chipsets for AMD.

Fedora? I keep trying it but I hate it. I've had trouble with the install disc booting on various configurations. RHEL? I hate working on it if I need X - its desktop configuration is the most disorganized I've seen, even compared to Slackware circa 1995. I used to like RedHat but from what I've seen they've taken leaps backwards - it seems as though they spent many man-hours planning the most counter-intuitive desktop imaginable. If I need RedHat or a RedHat-esque distribution, I run CentOS. I wouldn't pay for RHEL until they clean things up.

I keep going back and revisiting various distributions every 6 months or so (I don't blindly choose the distribution) but I invariably end up going back to SuSE because it Just Works(tm) (well, I hit some snags in 10.0 in Evolution and in the KDE/Samba integration but fixed those issues, but 10.1 seems to have resolved those).