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Oracle to Compete With Red Hat for Linux Support

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the and-the-consumer-wins dept.

PCM2 writes "It's not Oracle Linux, but Larry Ellison has announced that Oracle will be providing full enterprise support for Linux. This means not just phone calls but also patches, security fixes, and backports, in addition to indemnification from lawsuits like SCO's. This puts Oracle in direct competition with its erstwhile partner, Red Hat, whose entire business is based on providing similar support for its Linux distro and related software."

23 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. About time! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    About time! I for one am glad to finally get more complete end-to-end support.

  2. first step towards buying red hat? by carlivar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Perhaps just a strategy to get RHAT stock low enough to buy them?

    --
    Vote Libertarian
    1. Re:first step towards buying red hat? by saleenS281 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      IF? It's not IF, it's WHEN. How do you think Redhat is going to pay developers when Oracle undercuts their only money generator?

    2. Re:first step towards buying red hat? by dcavanaugh · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Sure, they said, "half price". Half of what and availble to whom?

      This is Oracle we are talking about. Surely there will be strings attached. Let's see if EVERYONE gets the low price (if it's as low as they claim). Knowing Oracle as I do, I predict that the wonderful pricing will somehow apply to only those customers with Oracle support contracts for other Oracle products. I will be very surprised if they offer it as a straight-up substitute for RHEL, available in quantity 1, to everyone with a credit card.

      Don't get me wrong, Oracle has some great products. But my purchase experience as an enterprise customer has been like walking into a car dealership. There was always some kind of nifty deal that I should be able to get, followed by lots of "reasons" why the wonderful discount was not available to ME.

  3. I understand.... by Creepy+Crawler · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why they would want their own distribution (either buy Rhat or make their own)..

    But why not use established systems with guaranteed update mechanisms? Something like Debian with the stable branch comes to mind.

    --
    1. Re:I understand.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Debian is a fine distribution, but companies don't like it because it isn't owned by the people who provide the support. RHEL3 is.

      I'm surprised that more people aren't posting the real reason why Oracle would be doing this. From being near DB upgrades, it seems relatively obvious to me. Oracle is not supporting their own version of Linux. All they're doing is extending the *existing* Red Hat support out a few years. Why? Because upgrading the OS on a database is a pain in the arse. To upgrade safely, you need to

      1. Build two new DB systems, a primary and a backup. You can chintz by only doing one and upgrading the old hardware to the new OS, but there are a lot of issues: increased risk of failure; limiting yourself to the old hardware's capabilities; needing to upgrade hardware on a separate schedule from the OS.

      2. Shut down operations.

      3. Copy the data from the old systems to the new.

      4. Turn on the new systems.

      5. Turn operations back on.

      6. Hope and pray that everything works.

      DBs are expensive (think $100,000 in hardware). Upgrading a year before capacity forces you to do so can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

      The planned outage can also cost thousands of dollars. If customers can't use your website, so they go to the competition...

      The switchover doesn't always work. If not, you have an unplanned outage which lasts even longer. Further, the unplanned outage might extend outside your upgrade window. E.g. you have a planned outage from 1 AM to 4 AM Pacific time. Something goes wrong mid-upgrade. You waste an hour trying to make it work. Finally, you give up and roll back. More troubles, the roll back is not clean. Upshot is that you're still down at 10 AM and have missed over half the east coast work day. Both the length of the outage and the fact that it extends into daylight mean that you lose even more business.

      Meanwhile, if you could have just waited another year, the systems that you are upgrading now would be unnecessary. Red Hat says that it isn't worth their time to sell support for RHEL3, and in most cases they are correct. However, for specific customers with high availability requirements, Oracle can make some money by extending the support lifetime of servers running their software. This further reinforces their position as one of the big two full service database supporters (IBM with DB2 is the other).

      In an ideal world, most DB users would prefer to never upgrade the existing database. It's much safer to just replace it. Clean cutovers with no outage are far preferable. Planned and predictable are the keys. That's why DB users hate having to upgrade just because Red Hat has stopped patching security holes in that OS.

      It's also worth noting that it's cheaper for Oracle to provide support than it would be for Red Hat. If Red Hat continued support, they'd find themselves supporting all sorts of additional pieces of sofware, e.g. Apache. Oracle's DB boxes are pretty single purpose. They run a minimal stack of software and Oracle just needs to support enough to run a DB on top.

  4. Extended warranty? by Junta · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Ok, in summary, Oracle will support only RHEL3 and RHEL4 distributions (per TFA). They didn't mention CentOS and said they wouldn't be packing it themselves, so the implication it is only copies purchased from RH. Best I can figure is that Oracle would be offering the equivalent of an 'extended warranty', targetting those who took the shortest support contract possible from RedHat and paying oracle with the rest, meaning either their hoping their name will carry weight or they plan to undercut RedHat for long term contracts.

    TFA says RedHat doesn't sell the 'OS', but that's bullocks. You cannot legally get RHEL without paying for it (some of the copyrighted artwork and name), hence the whole point of the existence of projects like CentOS. Their fundamental business is built on support, but it changes not the fact that they do not give away the distro they sell anymore.

    --
    XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    1. Re:Extended warranty? by RunzWithScissors · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The goal is to not pay Red Hat a dime. Think about it, how does CentOS work? Easy, Red Hat, being an open source company, releases the sourcecode for the entire Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution. Then CentOS takes the source code, removes all the copyrighted artwork and such, and BAM! CentOS. Oracle basically says they're going to do the same thing with their "Unbreakable Linux". So, you can get RHEL with out paying for it. Grab the source RPMs, remove the artwork, and rebuild binary RPMs.

      Really, this is Crazy Larry being pissed off that Red Hat bought JBoss. He's going to stick it to Red Hat the only way he can, run his own Linux support business, at a loss, in order to grab marketshare from Red Hat. Once Red Hat is anemic enough, or belly up, and his own customer base is large enough, he'll jack up the rate to something that's profitable. In Economic terms, this is known as "dumping". Flooding the market with low cost goods in order to gain market share. Then when all the competitors go out of business, you have a monopoly. And we all know what happens when someone has a monopoly...

      -Runz

    2. Re:Extended warranty? by Pecisk · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I think you are right. But we can extend this theory even more - RedHat propably is grewing some kinda of RHEL+JBoss+Postgresql combo, which easily can beat Oracle in price and reliability. So this is kinda Oracle answer.

      Anyway, this will be interesting to watch. More options in market, more alternatives to Microsoft combo - I love that. And free software proves what it is worth.

      --
      user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
  5. Yay. by sloth+jr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Because Oracle commits tons of code to the mainline linux kernel, unlike RedHat....

    Oracle seems to support Oracle - like ocfs2, which so far as I can tell, is the only substantial Oracle contribution in mainline.

    grep -r oracle.com /usr/src/linux
    grep -r redhat.com /usr/src/linux

    RedHat has invested in major contributors by putting them on staff. Oracle? Not so much.

  6. So? by TXG1112 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If it's anything like their support for their flagship products, Oracle and PeopleSoft don't bother. Anytime we report an issue with our multi-million dollar enterprise implementation, they spend several weeks trying to find some other party to blame. It's your hardware, no it's the network....etc.

    --
    I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.
    1. Re:So? by ilmdba · · Score: 4, Interesting

      i've found oracle's support for their database and financials products to be great.

      anytime i reported an issue with our several thousand dollar implimentation, they either already had a patch that fixed it, or had one shortly thereafter.

      so i guess everyone can mod both of these 'my individual experience' posts down, and call it even?

  7. It's about the value chain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Oracle's internal organization and practices lead to expensive services. They probably can't compete with Red Hat on price.

    My guess is that Oracle isn't really targeting Red Hat, they're targeting IBM and eventually Microsoft. Larry E. isn't noted for humility and, if he takes out Red Hat, it's just a way station on the road to a greater goal.

  8. Good news but for unexpected reasons. by Lethyos · · Score: 4, Interesting

    RedHat is stagnant. I have to admit a degree of ignorance here, but as far as I can tell, they are not really doing anything to excite interest in their market. They offer support and their own distribution (apart from Fedora Core) at outrageously high prices. (Even Windows server solutions are cheaper than RedHat.) Sure they gobbled up JBoss, but I do not think there is as much market overlap as one might suspect.

    I might even go so far as to say RedHat has done a fair amount of damage to Linux adoption: they create high costs and little value or innovation likely because they face no direct competition.

    With Oracle entering the picture, RedHat will be compelled to move quickly—to at least do something. I am not even quite sure what that is, but one way or another, this is adds choice for the market and that is always good, whether it results in a better RedHat or no RedHat.

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    Why bother.
  9. It turns out my information was outdated. by Lethyos · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I have not checked the prices of comparable RedHat and Microsoft server offerings. It turns out that RedHat is still cheaper, but by a trivial amount. Compare the RedHat Store (see: Server Operating System Products) and Windows Server 2003 R2 Pricing. (Wouldn't it be nice if Slashdot support post annotation or editing?)

    At any rate, Windows might still be a superior server platform thanks to the effectiveness of ActiveDirectory, fine-grained ACL, and so on. I am no Windows apologist (on the contrary, quite the advocate of open source solutions), but I fear Microsoft may be leaping far ahead of their competition in this space.

    --
    Why bother.
  10. Re:I'm confused... by Plug · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I would think that over the longterm Oracle's Unbreakable Linux will fork off, especially if this ends up seriously damaging RedHat, but for now Unbreakable Linux is nothing more than a re-branded copy of RedHat.

    Dystopian future: because Unbreakable Linux is built off RHEL (like CentOS is), Red Hat lose (some/half/all) of their support customers to Unbreakable, can't afford to keep producing RHEL, and Oracle base future versions of Unbreakable on what, now?

  11. Re:I'm confused... by chill · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Oracle, unlike CentOS, has money. They hire the fleeing Red Hat people and eventually buy the shell of what was Red Hat for a song. Larry, being partial to bowlers, adopts a new logo.

    --
    Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
  12. A fundamental problem with open source by MC68000 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In this case, we have the following scenario.
    Company A develops linux distribution, supports it.
    Company B simply compies Company A's work, supports it as well.

    My question is this, what is company A's incentive to develop a distribution? Because the development costs are 0 to company B and substantial to company A, company B can easily undercut the price of company A. It would seem like you'd have to be a fool to develop a distribution, since the GPL forces you to surrender your work to competitors who can easily undercut your price.

    --
    E = m c^3 Don't drink and derive E = m c^3
  13. Re:I'm confused... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I disagree. Unbreakable Linux is a strategy, its not the name of Oracle's version' of RH. Something else that's been missed here is that Oracle are going to be supporting only RH linux in this new strategy. How does this leave Novell's Suse?

  14. Ex-Oracle OSS strategy guy's view by savio13 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Very interesting blog by Dave Dargo, who, according to Matt Assay, used to lead Oracle's open source strategy, about the Oracle Linux announcement.

    An interesting point from Dave:
    I'm mostly curious as to why Oracle's first real support network is for someone else's product. Where's the Oracle Database Network and Applications Network and PeopleSoft Network and Siebel Network? Where are the support infrastructure networks for Oracle's own products to automatically distribute fixes, patches and alerts?
    And this quote made me laugh:
    It's amazing that they can provide all that for a mere $399 for a competitor's products, but not for their own $200,000 product.
  15. Re:I'm confused... by civilizedINTENSITY · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What Oracle gets by buying redhat is experienced redhat linux *people*. In a service industry people matter. People talk to clients. People know what works and doesn't, and can ask the right questions. Really, Oracle is buying *knowledge*. If it helps, consider buying redhat as the purchase of interactive organic knowledge agents. Hehehe, well I laughed ;-)

  16. Download Oracle Enterprise Linux OS by bluegeek · · Score: 2, Interesting
    From this page you can download the Enterprise Linux Operating System software. If you are interested in downloading Oracle Technology or Application software products, including those running on the Linux Operating System, click here.
    From: http://edelivery.oracle.com/linux/

    It seems a rebranded version of RHEL (a la CentOs). -- Ernest

  17. Oracle offers SCOmnification .. by rs232 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "The vendors aren't offering indemnification, Ellison said, and because of SCO, there's all this uncertainty and doubt about intellectual property. He says he will offer indemnification. In the Q&A at the end, he was asked if Oracle was planning to buy SCO to bring that uncertainty to an end. No, was the answer.

    "Red Hat has a separate indemnification policy. In Red Hat's case, this policy is called the Open Source Assurance program."

    Presumably if Larry really believed the SCO case had any validity he wouldn't even consider using RHEL. And in relation to RHEL and the GPL what's stopping anyone buying a single copy of Oracle Linux and repackage it and selling it with support contracts. Presumably if Larry doesn't allow this then Oracle is in breach of the license.

    "We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and (2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software"

    --
    davecb5620@gmail.com