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