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Oracle to Offer RedHat Support?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the declarations-of-war dept.

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."

38 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting turn of events by rugged-laptop · · Score: 4, Interesting

    (If this actually happens) This would be a very interesting turn of events. Oracle is widely credited as one of the reasons that Red Hat was able to break into the enterprise. If Oracle goes its own way, it will be interesting to see how Red Hat works through the challenge. On the other hand, supporting a full-fledged distribution is easier said than done.. May be Oracle is just posturing to get a better deal out of Red Hat.

    --
    Rugged Laptop Guide
    1. Re:Interesting turn of events by LnxAddct · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Oracle is doing this because Larry is pissy about RedHat buying JBoss, which Larry intended to buy and then put out of business.
      Regards,
      Steve

  2. I am sure people at Redhat are happy with that by avilella · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Because it means that Redhat is doing a good job and they need to grow to be able to satisfy more clients.

  3. MySQL? by rugged-laptop · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So, does this mean Oracle will support MySQL which is part of the Red Hat distribution?

    --
    Rugged Laptop Guide
    1. Re:MySQL? by aes12 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Doubtful... I'm sure the support agreement will only include those parts of the distribution which Oracle deems to be a requirement for Oracle's product. MySQL clearly doesn't fall into that category. My guess is that only a small subset of the full RedHat distro will be covered.

  4. Well could be worse for red hat by marcello_dl · · Score: 3, Funny

    Ok Ellison is dissatisfied with red hat support. It would have been worse if actual OS users were. Like that other operating system's users sometimes are...

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    ---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
    1. Re:Well could be worse for red hat by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      My organization is a customer of Redhat. We are *extremely* dissatisfied with Redhat's support. My support calls generally stay open for a minimum of two months, with some taking over a year. Their support is far worse than Microsoft's, and abyssmal in comparison to Sun's.

      About a year and a half ago we had a problem with nss_ldap. After waiting months for them to fix the problem, we looked through the source code, spotted and fixed the problem, and sent them the fix. After doing so we had to wait two more months for them to provide us with a supported hotfix. The package *still* isn't included in the RHEL4 disto.

      We had the same problem with RHEL3, but we hadn't actually run into it until recently. Not suprisingly, we were denied support for RHEL3 because it was going into maintanence mode two weeks after we notified them we were having the same problem with RHEL3.

      This is just *one* of the numerous support problems we've had. I could probably give three or four more example just like this one and we've only had Redhat support for 3 years...

    2. Re:Well could be worse for red hat by Bravoc · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I wonder if Ellison understands the industry or just makes stuff up as he goes along. CIO Insight Magazine named Red Hat #1 for offering value to its customers two years in a row. Oracle doesn't even seem to appear in the top 10.

      It'll be interesting to see how the market responds to such an offer.

    3. Re:Well could be worse for red hat by cloudmaster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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. :)

  5. I wonder... Orcale distro on the way? by Arimus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:I wonder... Orcale distro on the way? by Ctrl+Alt+De1337 · · Score: 4, Informative

      There has been a discussion partially about this before, and mentioned in the summary for that is about how Ellison has said does not intend to buy RedHat. As far as starting a distro, the consensus was that Oracle would be more likely to buy a distro that start one because it takes a long time to get a large and devoted community. Oracle certainly has the cash to do one, so don't rule it out, but it's probably not likely. Also, I think Ellison is too much of a control freak to support someone else's work for long if he doesn't have a say in it. I think he's probably got some backdoor channel with RedHat if he is going to support its products but not purchase the company.

  6. Oracle thinks Redhat Support is poor? by markir1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is really rather funny - Oracle's support is typically dreadful, so now they will further stretch their already thin support resources a little more to bring you even *less* support per dollar!

  7. Small potatoes by ivoras · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Red Hat is too small and does not do a very good job of supporting them [customers]
    What does this say about the largest and most successful Linux vendor out there? Only that in big business it's still a small fish.
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    -- Sig down
    1. Re:Small potatoes by schon · · Score: 2, Informative

      What does this say about the largest and most successful Linux vendor out there?

      It doesn't really say anything about it, why?

    2. Re:Small potatoes by ivoras · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Sorry, didn't know there's an "IBM Linux" :P

      Quote from IBM's site:

      Commercial distributions
      Commercial distributions of Linux are available from IBM Linux Distribution Partners Red Hat, SUSE LINUX and Turbolinux.

      Will the future of commercial Linux (i.e. the only one that counts) be that everyone has to support Linux in-house? Looking at the state of things today: more and more big corporations need to offer support for Linux themselves, instead of relying on what are supposed to be "Linux vendors". I'm not sure is this a good or bad thing, but it could lead to cutting out the middle man (e.g. RedHat) out of the loop and out of the market (thus costing geeks jobs, leading to more fragmentation, etc. etc.).

      It's different than with other commercial systems for sure: nobody expects they'd have to provide their own support for MS Windows or Solaris - it's supposed to "just work" and if something brakes, call Microsoft or Sun to fix it.

      One other thing: it could lead to a situation where there's a "Linux for everything" - in the sense that, if you want the best for your Oracle database, use this distribution, if you need it for SAP, use that one, etc. It's hard to predict how it will end, but it doesn't seem good.

      --
      -- Sig down
  8. Good! by LionKimbro · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wikipedia says Red Hat has 1,200-1,300 employees. Of those, I suspect a few hundred are going to support.

    Here's the rumor I've heard: (Can't name the source, sorry.)

    If a single mega-company were to migrate to Linux and rely on Red Hat for support, it would completely consume all of Red Hat's support resources, and then some. The rumor goes that this is one of the main problems with large companies that want to move to Linux: the support capacity simply isn't there.

    So, the reasoning goes, Red Hat is actually glad when projects like CentOS and Oracle support take off: Red Hat knows that it can't support everybody, it knows that it needs for it's platform to "win," it knows that there is incredible value in winning alone, and so: These developments are all good for Red Hat.

    After a little research, I find this article that supports what I've heard.

    A lot of us are thinking about these things in terms of home users. We don't give a damn for support- we just fix it ourselves, service it ourselves. It's part of owning a computer. But in the business, I understand they think about things differently: Support becomes a primary thing. It's not optional, even when you have internal IT people on staff.

    1. Re:Good! by mccalli · · Score: 4, Insightful
      If a single mega-company were to migrate to Linux and rely on Red Hat for support...

      ...then Red Hat would ramp up its support staff pretty much overnight, or start subcontracting quickly to someone else. Someone like, oooh, IBM Global Services to take a not-so-random example.

      Cheers,
      Ian

    2. Re:Good! by Burz · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, Red Hat seems more concerned with shoehornng everybody into their distro. So your point is well-taken.

      After all, who would WANT to support an "operating system" that may contain a near-infinite number of pieces depending on who you ask?

      This is a nasty Linux problem, not just a Red Hat issue: Lacking a clear and working definition of where the OS ends and where the 3rd-party stuff begins makes "Linux" much less supportable as a product.

    3. Re:Good! by sparkz · · Score: 4, Informative

      RedHat (as with all distros) are very clear about what they do and do not support; they'll support unmodified binaries distributed by themselves on the (say) RHEL4 CDs; if you build your own kernel, you're on your own. If you build your own Apache and have trouble with it, you're on your own. Come to that, if you misconfigure Apache and have trouble with it, you're pretty much on your own. I have called RedHat support once, on behalf of a customer who had paid approx £3000 for support (three boxes, IIRC). The RHN download failed to authenticate to the MS IIS proxy server, even though the GUI clearly indicated that it should be able to. The RedHat zonk just said that it was a MS problem. The MS proxy server was working normally, as it had been doing for ages; the RedHat Network GUI had a "MS Proxy Server" option, which took authentication details, but then failed to work properly. (It was a few years ago, I forget the precise details). I found a small perl script on SourceForge which did the authentication for me, providing a "localhost proxy server" and was able to patch the newly installed server. As I spent most of my time working with Sun at the time, I was not at all impressed by the slippery-shoulder attitude; the staff just didn't have the in-depth knowledge of the OS, and (even more importantly) there wasn't the infrastructure in place to escalate to those who did know.

      --
      Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
  9. I have to agree... by mhazen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    With Ellison... Red Hat is unfortunately not meeting the needs of its users. Although we agree, our reasoning is different.

    A significant part of my job is Linux sysadmin work, using licensed Red Hat Enterprise products. The tools are (for the most part) useful, reliable, and complete. The problem is, the enterprise distros are severely lacking in their packages and features.

    Recently, while building a distributed mail system (multiple servers in the mail chain, multidomain support and virtual mailboxes) on RHEL4,

    The recommended version for mail and database servers (Enterprise Server) does indeed have packages for Postfix (our preferred mail app) and MySQL available, but none of the Postfix packages have MySQL support enabled (Postfix has good MySQL support, including DB connection caching through a proxy interface). This effectively meant that none of the dozens of excellent mail administration tools out there would be available to us, and we couldn't put together a mail system that didn't rely on flat files in some fashion or another, without setting up parallel services (LDAP) solely to support mail services.

    I built the server once on Red Hat ES and when all was said and done, I ended up with seven major components having to be compiled either from source, or rebuilt RPMs with modified spec files and/or compile flags. This doesn't bother me, except for the fact that the whole reason my employer pays thousands upon thousands of dollars for an enterprise Linux was so that we could stick to standard packages, so that if a particular machine has issues, we don't have to rely on one person to know what's going on.

    I can't imagine we're the only paying client Red Hat has that wants to run a mail server that relies on a database server. It wouldn't chagrin me to change mail server or database packages (I've used most of the common ones), but looking deeper just led me to the realization that no matter which packages or paths I took, I'd still be stuck with the same issues.

    Until Red Hat gains better flexibility, timeliness, and awareness of their client needs, perhaps Ellison is on the ball with his visions of supporting the clients directly. I'm guessing he won't be supporting MySQL, though. And after rebuilding the server on Debian stable, with all features we desired being available in the core distro, we're happier.

    And I'm the only guy here who groks Debian well enough to run it, sigh.

    --
    Rock is dead. Long live scissors and paper!
    1. Re:I have to agree... by mhazen · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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!
  10. Re:Way to..... by mod_critical · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  11. Too small? by fimbulvetr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Like big is good? I don't know how many employees Oracle has, but I can say this: The number of employees in a company is not related to how good the support and/or products are.

    Let me count the ways:

    I'd venture to guess more than 3/4 of its technical staff is dedicated to writing useless bug-ridden java guis (each requiring differing versions of java) with absolutely no interoperability between them. None of them can be scripted and they're all pieces of shit.

    And let's not start with sqlplus. You think they could just hire one guy who may be able to put some readline support in there so it could get with the times.

    Another good example is security. How many employees does oracle have dedicated to their security team? I'd venture to guess they have one monkey. Not even a person. Do I need to bring up the unpatched vulnerabilities that are hundreds of days old?

    Now how about bug fixing? Anyone ever upgrade a production Oracle instance? No? You know why? Because you fucking can't. You have to wait until the latest patch has at least 1 year of testing because upgrades, even minor bug fixes, break in spectacular ways. So, because noone installs them, there's never any testing.

    1. Re:Too small? by molarmass192 · · Score: 2, Informative

      The surest way to perform non-patch release upgrades with Oracle is full export, install, full import. In place upgrades across major versions are inconsistent. Yeah, it's not the FASTEST way, but it's the best option, plus you get to compress extents, at least up until you get into the 300+ GB range. Once you reach that level, the downtime required just becomes too long. In place upgrades have to be practiced because the steps virtually always change between releases, it's clearly documented right there on pages 52 through 78 of the release notes!!! ;-)

      --

      Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
  12. Huh? by kernelpanicked · · Score: 4, Informative

    "What Red Hat does is every time to fix a bug you have to upgrade the operating system. They dont support old versions but just bug fixes That is not proper enterprise support and I think our customers are demanding that and I think you will see that coming from us."

    I'm pretty sure this guy doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. Since RedHat soesn't change software versions after a release, but instead backports security and bugfixes to the released version, what older versions is he referring to?

    --
    Ubuntu: If at first you don't succeed, blindly slap a sudo in front of it
  13. Sadly it is true - Red Hat support does suck by ams001 · · Score: 4, Informative
    and anyone who says differently obviously has not tried using their support much. Red Hat readily admit to their customers (our company being one) that they do not have enough developers to provide support. I quote from one of our oustanding support requests:

    I have talked to our developers and Product Management the last days and unfortunately we currently couldn't allocate enough developer ressources to get this issue fixed.

    I will try to check when the currently estimated time for this fix is. -- Response of 18 Jan to support query filed 4 Aug 2005, still no engineer assigned...

    On average we get a 6 month delay before the report reaches an engineer, and when it does the first thing we get asked is if the problem is still occurring (read fixed this yourselves yet?). Don't get me wrong. I love Red Hat and the work it does. We took on RHEL V4 instead of FC for the core services of our company, primarily for the support aspect. Out of the several support requests filed we only have had prompt decent support for one of them - and that was only because their web support had gone down and they were taking phone support. It really makes me wonder what the benefit of RHEL is over FC if support is near non-existant. Or is some big corporate with RHEL rolled out across all its servers consuming all of Red Hat's support staff, denying the small fries any look in to support?

    No wonder Oracle are looking to move in

  14. How much does this suck for Novell??? by soren42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    While I completely agree with Ellison, insomuchas my enterprise-level experiences with Red Hat's support have been awful, there's another side to this coin. I don't think it's been any secret in the industry that Oracle has been displeased with Red Hat, and vice-versa, however, the outstanding question has been how they would proceed in addressing these concerns. Would they buy Red Hat? Partner more with Novell? Release their own Linux distro? Or, as this would seem to indicate, something else uniquely Oracle?

    The big question here is, in my opinion, what does this say about Novell and Oracle in the enterprise? It could be argued that Oracle had already invested so much time and effort into nuturing their product line on Red Hat that a move to SUSE would be cumbersome. But, still, I would argue that Oracle's better move would be to deepen the Novell relationship. Novell has shown a consistent committment to enterprise products, Oracle included - and has the track record of good enterprise support.

    Personally, I can only say that I believe a move like this on Oracle's part would only serve to strengthen the position of Linux in the enterprise. As I alluded to above, the largest hurdle Red Hat could not overcome in my enterprise was poor support - something Oracle could easily address. So, in the end, it's a win for the industry...

    But, why not just buy Red Hat? And, to my original question, how much does this hurt Novell?

    --

    "Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."
    1. Re:How much does this suck for Novell??? by Snowy.White · · Score: 2, Informative

      I have seen this before while working for Oracle Support on the long forgotten CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) suite. This was initially hailed as the best of breed apps under the Oracle umbrella. Support for third party apps extended to logging the calls and passing directly to the relevant third party software support. However, after a year or two, Larry said how bad the idea was since Oracle is lumped with supporting all these apps for the third parties. And what actually happened to those third party apps (and/or companies)???
      Here's the list:
      - System Ess - Oracle has written a replacement module called Oracle OM (Order Management) with the same functionality,
      - GEMMS - Oracle bought the comapnay (repackaged the software as OPM - Oracle Process Manufacturing),
      - Empac - a replacement written as EAM (Enterprise Asset Management) having the same functionality,
      - Manugistics - left intact (probably because it was the most stable system in the whole suite),

      there were other companies that had a software package that Oracle did not have or was superior to Oracle's and they were swollowed up, eg. Peoplesoft (inc JDEdwards) and some smaller security companies.

      Judging by the past record, Oracle's next move is not hard to predict...

  15. You get what you pay for by pcguru19 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Redhate Enterprise support is aggressivly priced compared to other players in the enterprise (IBM(AIX), HP(HP-UX), Oracle, Microsoft, etc.). Staffing at most of these vendors can be split into sales, support, programming, r&d, and management. Redhat's income stream will dictate how fast they can grow and how many people they employ.

    The danger is to grow faster than your organization can absorb (so you don't have former janitors as VPs of development). If you do, quality and customer satisfaction will suffer. Some great examples are Leading Edge(anyone remember these guys?), Gateway 2000(who knew signing 900 retail leases within a couple of years could kill you? :) ), and Dell(who's been able to overcome this of late).

    So here's where it becomes interesting. You're potentially underfunded by your licensing model and you're seeing growth in the folks buying your service. Do you cut costs(layoff), finance expansion (go in debt to grow), or raise prices? These situations are when the CEO & CFO actually earn their paycheck. I'll be interested to see how Redhat responds.

    --
    STFU & GBTW
  16. Yes, Oracle will get into the OS biz. Here's why. by CurtMonash · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There are at least two senses of "support" here, which are hand-holding and actual bugfix/upgrade code changing. Answering the phones is the easy one, although dismal performance by various cost-cutting, outsourcing big vendors can obscure that point.

    So the real question is indeed, as already noted in this thread, will Oracle code, package, and support a particular Linux distro? I think it has to go that way. Here are two reasons why.

    1. Enterprises use huge application-oriented technology stacks -- hardware, OS, DBMS, app server, OLTP apps, analytics, etc., etc. They increasingly resist paying "value prices" for all those layers. Thus, each vendor wants ITS tiers to be value-priced, while the other layers are commoditized, both to free up money for that vendor, and to generally undermine the other big companies. Sun likes giving away DBMS. SAP is pushing cheap DBMS. Microsoft introduced low-cost DBMS. And so Oracle needs to strike back by, for example, ensuring that the OS gets commoditized.

    2. Oracle code is what Scott McNealy would call "a big hairball". Customers need to be protected from the complexity. Integrating the DBMS and OS is a potential way to do that.

    --
    To err is human. To forgive is good system design.
  17. And that is different from anyone else - how? by anomaly · · Score: 2, Informative

    I've worked with "enterprise" software for the past 8 years. My experience is that no vendor fixes everything we consider broken, and the largest vendors fix the least for us. The best overall support we get is from a 3-5 person company supporting a custom application they wrote for us. As far as COTS software is concerned, we've been working with an "up and coming" vendor (living on VC cash) who has been pretty responsive. The two largest software companies in the world have been little help to us, in terms of providing fixes to code that we consider broken.

    Someone is complaining about RedHat support? And that someone is Oracle? Puh leeze!

    I have yet to be impressed with the quality and responsiveness of enterprise vendors.

    --
    But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
  18. Sorry, but this is true by br00tus · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I work as a UNIX sysadmin at a Fortune 1000 company. Our UNIX environment is Red Hat and Solaris. About a year ago, the idea came about to phase out Solaris, which by that time was only running Oracle, so we began beta-testing Oracle on Red Hat, and had it to the point where we had it in production for a little while. It was disastrous - we actually had to take our production database out of production and switch it to a Solaris box. This has really soured us on the idea of Oracle on Red Hat, and even if there were improvements in the last year, this would still weigh on our minds.

    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.

  19. Re:Way to..... by Kludge · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It is competing service, and the GPL allows it, but don't claim that they wouldn't be hijacking Red Hat's clients. They will be.

    And the other question is: will Oracle work on the product releasing all sorts of products back to the community as Red Hat has done (tux, netscape directory server, kernel improvements too many to list, etc, etc), or will they just tell people which nobs to tweek to get their $$$ commercial product running? I'm guessing the latter, and the original post was right: Ellison is a dick.

  20. This is great news for Redhat by poofyhairguy82 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    If you honestly think about it, this is great news for Redhat. I know that some investors are nervous that Oracle is now cutting into Redhat's core business, but what they give back is more than worth it.

    Oracle says they plan to support Redhat. Not SUSE. Not some Oracle distro. So that right there is a stamp of approval on the entire Redhat "platform" if you will. Now there will be less fear that Oracle might make another distro its favorite soon- they would not hire a bunch of people to support Redhat if they planned to move to SUSE next month. Also this gives the Redhat+Oracle platform something you can't get with Solaris+Oracle or Windows+Oracle- a one stop shop for support. Redhat will be the ONLY OS that Oracle can completely provide support for. That means as of now Redhat is the best platform for Oracle. Period.

    Oracle plans to support Redhat. Not CentOS or Fedora or some other free Redhat. That means if someone wants a solution for Oracle supported Redhat they still have to BUY Redhat's OS from the company. There might be some people (in fact I know one for sure) that might be holding out on switching to a Redhat Oracle solution (from a Solaris or Windows one) because they want support from a company far bigger than Redhat (like Sun and MS are). Now they have that. Plus I would not be surprised if many companies (do to ignorance, comfort, whatever) double dip- buy both Redhat and Oracle Redhat support. This can only grow Redhat's marketshare!

    Its a win-win for Redhat- there platform becomes more stable and accepted, they will maybe get more people to buy their OS (that would prefer Oracle support compared to support from an OS vender like Microsoft or Redhat) and they get tons of free press.

    I would be mad if I was at Novell or Sun today.

    --

    Open Source Sushi

  21. You need to RTFA by poofyhairguy82 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Red Hat has wasted enourmous amounts of money on the kernel if any johnny-come-lately can best their support offerings and contribute nothing? What's the incentive to give away your code now?

    Go RTFA. It doesn't say "Oracle will support Fedora" or "Oracle will support CentOS." It says "Oracle will support Redhat." As in the Redhat OS that you have to pay to get a copy of. It seems even Ellison doesn't get it either. To quote the article:

    "We can just take Red Hat's intellectual property and make it ours, they just don't have it."

    Um.....no you can't Larry. Redhat owns its name. It owns its logos. It uses these to maintain its control over their OS. You can't just take Redhat and stick it in a box and sell it as your own. Redhat will sue you into the ground for using their trademarks without permission. Then suddenly Redhat's money would come from litigation- much of the market uses that as a business model.

    With this move Ellison is making Redhat's name (which he does not control) more valuable. That means more money for Redhat in the long run. One again he is trying to rule the world but ends up shooting himself in the foot. OSS is fine, Oracle's leader's grasp of trademark is not....

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    Open Source Sushi

  22. Riiight - like Oracle actually supports Oracle... by billybob_jcv · · Score: 2, Funny

    Larry ought to try submitting a few hundred metalink tickets before he decides to dis anyone else's support. Oracle support is the KING of the classic support shuffle:

    1) User submits ticket, giving detailed information of the exact module and section of code that is causing the problem.
    2) Support immediately responds with a canned message that says they are working on it.
    3) 24 hours go by with no further response, so user pings ticket.
    4) Support asks user to post a pile of log output, most of which can have nothing to do with the problem.
    5) 24 hours go by with no response, so user pings ticket.
    6) Support says they have engaged a specialist and are waiting for a reply.
    7) 24 hours go by with no response, so user pings ticket.
    8) Support says the original analyst is unavailable, so they are passing the ticket to a new analyst who will find out what is going on.
    9) 24 hours go by with no response, so user pings ticket.
    10) Support asks user to post a pile of log output, some of which has already been posted, and what is new is for modules that you aren't even running.
    11) User's Project Manager wants to know WTF is going on and why the f@#$%&* system isn't running yet.
    12) Project Manager complains to his VP who claims to have a tight relationship with Oracle upper mgmt.
    13) VP calls his buds in Oracle Sales and asks WTF is going on.
    14) Oracle Sales schedules a conference call with the Oracle VP of Who-The-F*%$-Knows for a week from next Thursday.
    15) User says "screw it!" and either downloads an open source module that does the same thing (but correctly), or just writes the patch himself.
    16) User's VP & Oracle VP schedule a golf outing and a night in an NBA box.
    17) Deal is cut to buy another $1M worth of Oracle SW plus 22% for Support.

  23. Someone wake me when... by Builder · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Oracle starts offering Oracle support.

    We spend well north of 300k per year with Oracle, and I've been disgusted with the support we receive from them. Coming from a mysql / Postgresql background, I was expecting a lot more when I started working with and supporting Oracle systems, but Oracle's support staff are consistently hard to understand and not able to function when your problem falls outside their script. Escalation can be time consuming and even then you're not guaranteed a solution.

    If the answer isn't in metalink, you're in trouble.

    A couple of weeks ago we ran into a problem with a RAC cluster. After 3 hours of downtime, we logged a call with Veritas as Oracle were insisting that Veritas was the problem. I really wished we logged that call a LOT earlier... The guy at Veritas took about 2 minutes to explain which Oracle component was at fault and how to fix it.

    Having said that, Red Hat support is pretty appalling too. I've had some classic responses to support questions from them, including advice NOT to hotswap disks on an HP DL380 (despite it being designed for this).

    Mostly, I just dislike Red Hat lately because of their draconian licensing policies on some of their products... I can't even get eval versions of products that have my code in them :( So anything that forces them to compete and rethink their business approach is fine with me.

  24. What DOES this mean? by ratboy666 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I just did a "quick" job.

    By quick, I mean two days billable.

    A client was demonstrating an application using Oracle running on EL3. Hardware platform was a SUN v40z, with 8GB of memory. The client had a "simple" problem -- the sysem was only using half of the available memory.

    Solution? Of course its obvious. Simply deploy the large memory kernel. But, they had three Oracle people on site, who were not familiar. The client had brought in someone else, who had no clue. I was happy, because I get to bill at emergency rates (a demo was scheduled for less than a week away). The client also wanted me to look at kernel tuning for Oracle.

    If Oracle starts providing this service, it will, of course, cut me out of the loop. But I don't think it can change right away. Oracle has to provide a lot of internal training first. I expect that there will be work "in them thar hills" for the next two years...

    Ratboy

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    Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061