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Oracle to Offer RedHat Support?
rs232 writes to tell us ITP is reporting that Oracle's Larry Ellison recently called Red Hat's ability to honor their support contracts effectively into question. Taking that claim one step further, Ellison claims that Oracle will soon start offering support for Red Hat Linux users. From the article: "The reason for this move, which Oracle executives later declined to provide any real detail on, is that Red Hat isn't doing a good enough job of providing that support itself, Ellison said. 'Red Hat is too small and does not do a very good job of supporting them [customers],' he said."
Given the effort required to be able to offer support on a third party distro I wonder if over time Oracle will come to the conclusion they can provide their own distro as easily as carry out support for distro over which they have no/limited control.
Either that or will Oracle end up buying RH?
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
Cheers,
Ian
Hijack? This is free enterprise!
In fact, in the open source world, this is where competition is probably going to go. Since the products are developed by the community, and some markets are flooded with options for product choice (media players, GUI dekstops, etc), the next real way to compete is going to be offering support for OSS products that someone _else_ is already offering support for.
It's not a hijack, its a competing service! Granted this situation is like a wal-mart moving into town, but it's still capitalism.
Keeping a server running isn't difficult, it's the amount of time it takes to keep them ALL going that gets to be a bother.
The nature of my work (as is the case with most of us, I'd guess) is that there are always new services and systems needing to be built (or rebuilt, as they age) while existing services rarely get mothballed, and so even a modicum of building packages easily snowballs over time into an all-consuming task. The less time I have to spend looking backwards, the more I can keep us moving forward.
It boils down to time. If maintaining that single mail system was my only job, I'd be on easy street, but at best that systems encompasses but a sliver of my job responsibilities. I prefer to avoid spending hours each week building and pushing custom packages to servers, if I can implement a solution which is more hands-off.
The big selling point of enterprise systems for large organizations is the centralized management and administration tools, which often become useless when you aren't using prebuilt packages from the vendor.
The other problem here is that every environment is different, and the environment a server works in can significantly change the requirements, as well as the time investment, for installing and maintaining.
While I'm very experienced with Linux and very at-ease in most *nix environments, I'm not a one-person shop, and while I can build and maintain complex, custom systems doesn't mean the guy who's running that server six months from now has my skill set. Part of being a good administrator is making the job easy for whoever gets called to fix a server when you're on vacation, or after you leave.
Regards-
Rock is dead. Long live scissors and paper!
I saw the tag "fud" for this article. Sorry, but this is not fud, it is the truth. You can give those standard Linux zealot lines about how if we had given more resources to it, had more, smarter sysadmins with better experience and so on and so forth that it would work. But the managers do not want to hear that, they are running a business, they are not in the Linux evangelism business. The reason they liked the idea of a switch is Red Hat on Intel is generally cheaper than Solaris on Sun boxes, and it would allow us to standardize on one UNIX platform. But there were just too many problems.
I am a Linux zealot myself, at home I have a Debian with no non-free software, not even non-free Java. But business does not think about that. The Linux kernel core team (Torvalds, Morton etc.) seem to have the strategy of competing for the high-end market with Microsoft and Sun (and some IBM lines, although IBM stands to benefit from Linux in other of its product lines). This seems like a good strategy to me since the high-end market seems up-for-grabs nowadays. Business feeling comfortable with Oracle running on a business-friendly distribution like Red Hat is essential. There are plenty of SQL Server databases running on Windows in production in Fortune 500 companies, how many Oracle on Red Hat's are there? This is essential. The worst-case scenario is it is still not there yet, Sun collapses, and Microsoft swallows up the market.
I am not just all talk - my home desktop is Debian with no non-free software. I evangelize Linux at work. I sent checks to the Free Software Foundation. I write GPL software. But this is not fud, this is reality that must be faced, and business feeling comfortable with Oracle on Red Hat is a must. Someone commented that Oracle support sucks and will they do better than Red Hat? Well, I don't know one way or the other as our DBA is who calls Oracle all the time. But this is important for Oracle, and Red Hat, and Linux and the whole free software community to get right.
The only reason RedHat sells anything to "corporate" America is because they *offer* support. It's not because anyone actually uses it. The people making decisions at large companies (such as the Fortune 25 company I work for now, or the Fortune 50 semiconductor company I worked for before) want another company that says they'll support the product. Perhaps even one that will have meetings with them. They don't care if the support is ever actually used, and the admins actually working with the software know that nearly anything they try to *do* with the software will invalidate the support, but no one cares. It's just that empty promise and a big ad in a trade magazine. Somehow I doubt that Oracle will make things any better, except for supporting a couple more specific configurations/situations that probably no one will actually find themselves in. :)