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

Is it just me?

[pubjames]

Is it just me, or does it seem like a lot of the IT companies don't get Linux and OSS.

Hint to Larry (and IBM, HP, Novell, etc): Work together on a single distribution of Linux if you want to get rid of Microsoft. Commoditize the OS and make your money providing services and software on top of it.

So now we can look forward to...

[Billosaur]

"We're missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux."

Ladies and Gentlemen, Larry Ellison proudly presents -- Orix!

I for one am not jumping on this bandwagon, because Larry is driving and I don't think he has one hand firmly on the wheel as it is. This is a shotgun marriage and isn't liable to make Oracle any more competitive with Microsoft in the forseeable future. He should have probably done this 5 years ago.

In other news

[Billly Gates]

Mysql and postgresql are mysteriously missing from SuSE after the acquisition

Re:In other news

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

You overreacted. KDE is still very much supported on SuSE. Why jump ship based on a rumour of what someone might possibly do when you can just as easily jump ship later if they ever actually do it. I am on OpenSuSE 10.0 now and the water is just fine.

Years ago I was worried that what I was doing did not have much of a future and was looking at retraining doing something else. In the end I decided to carry on with what I was already specialised in and cross that bridge (retraining) when I came to it. I am still working on the same platform 20 years later, still worried that it is going to run out at some point but have noticed that some of the alternatives I was looking at back then no longer exist.

Don't panic.

Apples & Oranges

[MudButt]

Work together on a single distribution of Linux if you want to get rid of Microsoft

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? Does a person purchase a vehicle and decide between the two of those? Not for the most part. For the most part, I've seen IT professionals pick the right tool for the job. When I need to deploy a Microsoft solution, it's usually because it's the best fit for the job. When I need to deploy and Linux solution, it's usually because it's the best fit for the job.

IMHO, there are very few instances where and educated IT professional could actually have to compare a MS or OSS solution in the same way a car buyer would compare a Ford F350 and Honda Civic.

Re:yay

[utlemming]

Better yet, just imagine how this would have some serious impact on our friends at SCO? They thought they were taking on IBM, and Novell got into the mix, but with an acquistian by Oracle you would have SCO up against IBM and Oracle -- two heavy weights. To really make it painful, Larry Ellision is not known for being a nice business man.

Re:oracle tuned

[hackstraw]

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.

RedHat threatened? How about Sun Microsystems?

Back in the day, Sun's Solaris was the target for Oracle. Every other platform was a port of it, and reportedly not as good. I've only used Oracle on Solaris for big and important DBs.

I've thought for years that Oracle should be an OS because an Oracle box is not going to be doing much else anyway. Oracle has its own filesystem, redundancy, clustering, you name it. Many of Oracle's "big boy" features are blurred between what an application does and what an OS does. Its common that the first thing you do when you install oracle is modify the OS to allow for Oracle to work. Most importantly, its the shared memory parameters of the OS that needs to be modified (or at least used to as of version 10).

Having an Oracle OS seems inevitable. With Linux its more than possible.

Re:That's been out for a while.

[bernywork]

Umm Oracle Financials, the complete design and implementation, full Java front end, a complete dev environment... So they have an application dev environment, and all the applications they put out, now including PeopleSoft.

Oracle supports Novell / Suse, Asianux and RHES as it stands now. As well as doing code contributions back to the kernel. Admittedly this is predominantly to do with their clustered file system, and some of the memory allocation stuff, but still, it's better than some. They also run a number of their servers on Linux as well. They would have to have one of the biggest commercial Linux installations around at the moment.

So; they are doing application development on Linux, Linux kernel work, supporting the operating system through 3 or so distributions and a number of iterations thereof...

Really, why not just buy Novell / Suse and take their staff who can help to support it, and who are doing exactly that now?!?

Re:Not another distribution.

[everphilski]

IF everyone ran Windows the world would be so much better. Imagine one central repository where everything could be collected, supported, and distributed.

Now think about what you just said if someone from another vantage point said it. Just because its your favorite distro doesn't mean its right for everyone. Multiple vantage points is what keeps linux and the rest of the computing world competitive.