Oracle Linux?

eldavojohn writes "There have been rumors floating around of Oracle working on their own distribution of Linux. If this is true, it is widely believed that this enterprise edition of Linux would be in direct competition with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. What is spurring the rumors? Well, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison said, 'I'd like to have a complete stack. 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.' I know that Oracle has been doing a lot more than databases recently, will they go the extra mile and create their own stripped down Linux kernel? If they do, will companies switch to database solutions that are running Oracle only software for the benefits of support and (hopefully) stability?"

Comments

OpenSolaris?

[AKAImBatman]

I'm a bit surprised that they're not considering OpenSolaris. Linux is nice, but Oracle has been supporting Sun Solaris for far longer. Using Solaris as their base kernel would allow them to provide a large number of enterprisey (lt;-technical term) features out of the box.

Not to say that 2.6 doesn't have bunches of enterprisey (<-technical term again) features, but Solaris is still a leader in that space.

Oracle Appliance

[gEvil (beta)]

Admittedly, I don't follow or know a whole lot about Oracle, but wouldn't a move like this open the door to them selling a self-contained Oracle Appliance for small- and medium-sized businesses? Of course, they could also supply a list of supported hardware for people to run it on machines purchased elsewhere or built by the company's hardware guru.

Flaming on!

[mcrbids]

Why not BSD?

1) Lackluster commercial support - Linux tends to have better hardware support, drivers, etc.

2) SMP support on the *BSDs is still young and immature. Linux, in comparison, is quite mature, and does very well on an 8-way system. BSD *might* do it, but much beyond 4-way is a sail into uncharted waters. I'm already running a cluster of 4-way boxen, so 8-way or more is not very far off, given our company's annual 2x growth curve.

3) "It's different". Yeah, it's very similar, but if you're already used to the "Linux" way, having to rediscover how services get initialized (a la /etc/rc) is really a pain.

4) Linux is "good enough". It's obvious that whatever metric is needed to be able to be "enterprise ready", Linux has passed it. Granted, nobody agrees on what that standard is, but most people agree that Linux can do it.