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Oracle Linux Explored
M-Saunders writes "Two days ago Slashdot reported on Oracle's move into the enterprise Linux market, and how it may challenge Red Hat. Red Hat's stock has already dropped, and there's a great deal of talk about the implications of this act. Linux Format got hold of the 'Unbreakable' distro to find out what's going on under the hood. Is it a breakthrough for Linux in the corporate market, or just another RHEL respin? See the article for all the info and screenshots — including an 'interesting' choice of GRUB colours."
To quote the web article:
Unusually, Oracle are claiming that they will support your operating system indefinitely as part of the Premier Support package which works out at $1199 and $1999.
These lifetime models get pretty interesting - you don't know if they are financially viable until a few years have gone by.
But I've seen a few health clubs, airlines and government pension plans so on, suffer on the weight of their liabilities such as lifetime memberships, lifetime frequent flyer points, a unfunded retirement pensions.
That is actually a big risk over a 10 year period..
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
but, first release...
I would be more than satisfied if they come with an easy solution for installing Oracle flawlessly on most linux flavors!
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Redhat: Unfakeable Linux - Oracle a Fork!
http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/?q =node/20
From the article: "A recent CIO Insight Research Study ranked Red Hat No. 1 for "vendor value". Oracle ranked 39 out of 41 overall, 40th in the category "meets expectations for lowering costs.""
Too expensive? I know why. Larry buys too big boats, too often. And, above all, he never invited me... (Now is your chance, Larry!)
Oracle wants to sell their application stack and figure that integrating an OS into that stack gives them vendor lock-in. I think the OS is a commodity part like the hardware and Oracle's strategy logically leads to them rolling in a big black box you just plug into the datacenter. Personally I just think this is petty revenge for Red Hat daring to reach up into their high margin software stack with JBoss. By effect squeezing RH's tight OS margin by scraping off the 10-15% of their businees that supports the Oracle stack. Hoping to put pressure on RH's cash flow and force them to circle the wagons to protect their core business.
1. Copy someone else's flagship software exactly
2. Remove all vendor identity
3. Explain how your's is somehow "better"
4. Profit and repeat
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
Oracle just announced a security patch to fix the "DB2 optimization malware" on Unbreakable.
I understand Oracle is an industry juggernaut, but $160,000 for a 4-CPU license (from the Guardian article)? Is Oracle really that superior to Ingres, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, and especially PostgreSQL or MySQL?
I'm not trying to troll here. I'm just thinking that for the cost of several Oracle installations and experienced Oracle DBAs you could get a much cheaper (or outright free) database and some really top notch talent.
Greetings.
There is a wrong perception that large companies don't adopt Linux because they prefer commercial offerings. This is only half right. It's not that they like commercial software per se, or that they don't know or understand the benefits of open-source software. The real issue for the lack of adoption is the perceived legal exposures of running software and becoming liable for it (SCO, anyone?). These large companies would be happy to bring Linux in-house as long as a larger company offers some kind of indemnification clause in their contracts.
Many large companies offer Linux distributions and absorb the indemnification. It's no wonder then that superior distributions like Ubuntu aren't on the enterprise shopping list: there is little or no viable indemnification offered. Red Hat is a big fish among open-source vendors but not large enough to convince many large enterprises to take the plunge. That's why IBM has made a good play in this arena: their Linux offerings are rather crappy, but they offer the magic word: INDEMNIFICATION. This has opened many doors for them that remained shut to other vendors.
An Oracle offering brings the same "large company support" that will let the pussies in legal departments and the dumbass middle managers sleep well at night. Oracle is already known to work well with Linux; couple that that with Red Hat functionality and Oracle support (especially if other Oracle products are involved) and that makes a very attractive proposition for all the parties involved. If Oracle plays this right they can start by offering Red Hat dressed in Oracle garb as they came out of the gate, and then provide a migration path toward Ubuntu or another Linux distribution with better tools.
Oracle didn't get that big by being idiots. They are smart and they are aggressive. I think that this is overall a good thing. It creates more competition for IBM, who perhaps now will actually push for real Linux offerings that work, for Novell with SuSe, for Sun and Solaris, and it opens the door for upstarts like Canonical who are well-positioned to make Ubuntu a household name. Last, it will open doors to Linux that would otherwise remain shut. Oracle Linux marks the maturity phase of the first round of consolidation and is the harbinger of the next distribution wars. The next five years will be very interesting.
Cheers,
Eugene Ciurana
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
Is this the first unbreakable breakthrough?
But my organization is not allowed to just go to any schmoe who says they support generically Enterprise Linux. There's a reason we get the contracts that we do with customers, and one of the main ones is because we use a WIDELY supported OS (Red Hat EL) that is common criteria certified to a certain level. Likewise, Red Hat has had it's certification program for professionals out for several years now, and we have several people on staff who are certified and know backwards and forwards how to install and support Red Hat as well as Oracle products.
Likewise, the licensing scheme is pretty interesting. That is NOT the price per server. That is the price per CPU...how they determine the actual CPU will probably be something stupid like their database products, where a quad-Core CPU they count as 2.5 or some nonsense.
Also, not sure how many people have called Oracle lately, but when I call for support, I don't want to be transferred to some faker in India who I can't understand, who says their name is Joe. Dell was guilty of that early on, and we saw how well that worked. Now, their Gold and Silver support for the USA is all back to 100% English speaking people usually in the CST time zone. This is the mistake Red Hat never made...when you buy premier support from them, you get access to an RHCE or higher support person in the USA who you can actually understand, who generally isn't guessing on what your problem might be.
If Oracle wants to compete with Red Hat globally (markets OUTSIDE the USA), I can see that. But I think any USA residents would be fools to go with Oracle instead of Red Hat.
Like anything Oracle tries to do after the fact and supposedly *better* than others (Oracle Collaboration Suite?), I think this idea to compete directly against Red Hat is a stupid one. When I have Oracle issues, I don't even call Oracle anymore...I call a 3rd party consultant or an engineer at Red Hat...99% of the time I usually get better/quicker results.
Since Red Hat bought Cygnus a couple of years back, Linux is no longer everything they do, there's also the gcc business. As far as I know, the gcc business earns money from embedded toolsets, and contracts with microprosessor manufacturers (including big ones like Intel) to improve gcc on their kit, or to port gcc to new CPUs.
So, can anyone in the know comment on how much of Red Hat's business is Linux, as compared to what used to be Cygnus?
When you toss in taxes, benefits, and other overhead, cost per employee can easily double.
And after that year, you either keep paying your DBA or he goes away.
Yesterday I suggested Oracle entering the game would be good for the market by increasing competion among Linux vendors. Looking at this offering, I have to say: what a joke. I was completely wrong.
Oracle are pulling nothing more than a publicity stunt with this. I expect I would be correct in the speculation that some marketing executive asked some developers to slap together an “Oracle branded distribution”. They then took a release of Fedora Core and changed graphics and colors. Boom! Instant industry player.
Why bother.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
'Our biggest competitors are our customers' - paraphrase of a shareholder statement for a high tech company.
Companies don't NEED Red Hat support. All the documentation they need is freely available. They could provide all their own Linux support. The reason companies buy support from Red Hat is because it is cheaper and more reliable than doing it in-house.
Companies do need to buy support from Oracle because it is closed source. On the other hand, the open source databases are getting better. Oracle has two challenges: it has to provide better support than Red Hat (Oracle has a lousy rep.) and it has to fight off the steadily improving open source databases. In the long term, things don't look that good for Oracle. In the short term, we will see if they can use their superior size to crush Red Hat.
Couldn't a group of Oracle users form a support group and distribute upgrades for free. It's not as if Larry has any objection to stealing software.
davecb5620@gmail.com
From a pure business perspective, I think this is a mistake for Oracle. Linux is typically the operating system of choice for the more technically savvy customers and Oracle's distribution will take some time to build up street cred with true geeks like you and me.
But if you read up on Larry, the bigger picture emerges. Larry doesn't see Oracle as a company indefinitely limited to database software or business apps. He's jealous of Microsoft even though the only MS products that really compete with Oracle are SQL Server and Microsoft Dynamics. He's jealous of Steve Jobs even though there are no Apple products that compete with his products. Larry is threatened by anybody who impinges on his desire to be the richest guy in the world and making Oracle the largest software company in the world.
I know it sounds dramatic, but I really think that despite all the business related pros and cons, Larry just thinks it's his god given right to own the operating system market, too. He's probably thinking about pushing Unbreakable Linux on the business desktop in order to cut into Microsoft's virtual desktop monopoly. While that might be good for Linux, I'd much rather that someone like Bill Gates have the money and power that he has than hand it over to Larry.
For those unschooled about the megomaniacal bad boy of Redwood Shores, you might check this out.
You can make a difference. Donate to The LEEBY (Larry Ellison's Even Bigger Yacht) Fund.
Back in 02-03 I worked for a small startup. We were running Oracle on Linux doing dev work. We called them up to inquire about licenses. I think we were quoted $32k for our setup. We naturally told them, nevermind, we'll port it to MySQL and they eventually came back and offered us a deal at $4k. Of course, our app was meant to be installed at several high profile insurance companies so that meant more Oracle Licenses for them in the future.
BTW, all those numbers are from my rather fragile memory. YMMV.
-- Jason
It's because lawyers are universally disliked, so they become easy targets for insults regardless of how apt the insults might be. Even though professionally fighting with others makes you far less of a "pussy" than some random egghead, lawyers never get the amount of respect outside of their field that is commensurate with the grief they put up with. The fast-tracked, slick Wall Street lawyer prick is the exception, not the rule. Real lawyering is gritty, tireless and it is very personal.
Typical Oracle. This kind of take-no-prisoners aggression might play well in corporate boardrooms, but it will not sit well with the Linux community. Instead of courting Linux like a suitor, Oracle decided to take Linux home to bitch slap her around.
As Oracle will soon find out, Linux can't be bought. Demeaning the developers who provide the infrastructure on which you depend, devaluing their stock, and otherwise acting hostile won't reap Oracle any rewards. Maybe Larry is used to getting his way in the boardroom, but when it comes to dealing with people on equal terms, which is the way the FLOSS community works, Larry's record isn't so stunning. Just ask all of his ex-wives.
I would really like to see RedHat throw a lot of weight into their "RedHat DB" product. As a postgres user I have been rather disapointed with RedHat's lack of marketing and their pricing of the product. I have never had to use any of the oracle to postgres migration tools, so I don't know how robust they are, but what if RedHat started marketing to existing Oracle users? If Oracle wants to take market share away from RedHat I would really like to see RedHat fight back. Any thing that gets postgres more users is a huge plus.
"if this kills Red Hat, well, Oracle could either buy the company for peanuts or move on and suck the blood out of another vendor such as Novell or Debian."
Oh no! I sure hope Debian's stock price doesn't drop!
1) I don't see Oracle as having better/more Linux knowledge than those at RedHat so sell this as "Oracle to compete....Linux Support"? Would you pay an OS vendor for Oracle support?
2) If I use a database on Linux it is MySQL. I use Oracle on Solaris exclusively. I know it is a technical fallacy but I have to say it, "they go together".
3) If companies have to tweak the OS for their software to run then I tend to shy away from the software.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Oracle is a dying company build on an obsolete (proprietary) model. It doesn't matter how good their database is, since everyone hates to work with it. It is the same reason why properietary UNIXes failed against Linux/BSD. They just aren't fun to use, even if in some areas they may be technically superior -- enthusiastes prefer systems that are fun and easy to use, like Linux and MySQL.
I can maintain a MySQL database with my eyes closed, but every time I encounter Oracle I feel like vomiting. Guess how many Oracle installations I am going to recommend to my boss?
I would be more than satisfied if they come with an easy solution for installing Oracle flawlessly on most linux flavors!
They certify that Oracle products will install trouble free on Red Hat and SUSE Linux Enterprise level distributions (Fedora and OpenSUSE not included) and all the installations I have done one these Linux distributions have indeed gone without a hitch. I have also tried to install Oracle on Fedora and it usually goes trouble free but not by any means always. If you really desperately don't want to pay for an Enterprise quality SUSE or Red Hat license you can achieve most of the benefits of an Oracle certified enterprise Linux distro but without paying for the privilege by using something like Centos which is binary compatible with the Red Hat Enterprise distros but if you do decide to run Oracle software on an uncertified Linux distro then you are on your own. There is a reason Oracle doesn't certify Oracle Database, Oracle Application Server or other Oracle products for Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware and the entire remainder of the Legion of Linux distributions out there and I can easily understand why since if Oracle certified their entire product range for every single Linux distro the growth in support requests would be enormous. The moral of the story is that if you want to build a Production system and run someting like an Oracle DB or AS stably and achieve high uptimes and long MBTF rates you had better run your Oracle DB or AS on a certified distribution, not your un-certified pet distribution. Of course now that Larry is at war with Red Hat perhaps the certification list will change a little... Ubuntu perhaps???
Gentlemen! Flame away...........
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
They are not adding any value, which brings me back to a point I drilled in my previous post. That is all that matters to the market. Just rebranding it and offering essentially the same product does not accomplish this. If they did not want to innovate or offer anything fundamentally superior to RedHat, it would have been better for all parties involved (the two companies and their customers) if they created a partnership. I think it is not hard to see the benefits of that. Instead of a single outstanding offering, we have one good (RedHat) and one mediocre (Oracle).
Why bother.
Just because YOU don't understand Oracle doesn't mean it sucks. Oracle has enterprise features that simple are not available in Postgres or MySQL. MySQL might work great for your mom-and-pop website, but it doesn't cut the mustard for banking and financial environments.
As an Oracle DBA and developer, I love working with it everyday, and I can maintain it with MY eyes closed. I find it interesting to apply its capabilities to solve business issues. I too am an enthusiast, and I surpassed the capabilities of both Postgres and MySQL years ago. Perhaps you just aren't up to the challenge?
Every time I encounter someone pushing a toy database in an enterprise environment, I want to vomit!
How much new SW has RedHat actually contributed to the community (not just support)? How much of that has been used in other distros?
We in the OSS community should benchmark Oracle's entry into the biz by measuring their contribution of code against how much money they earn on their distro. Their late entry is welcome, but does start "standing on the shoulders of giants", including RedHat's. The real contribution of a corporation getting all that "free" software to turn into a business is measured in their contribution of new code others can turn into a business, along with their cooperation in the mutual ecosystem.
What are Oracle's expected contributions to OSS Linux software? Anything other than just kernel tweaks that make Oracle RDBMS run better?
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make install -not war
Maybe biased, some some good points none-the-less:
http://www.linspire.com/linspire_letter.php
read the article thinking "Oracle Linux Exploded"
fifteen jugglers, five believers
Why is every new linux distro "review" nothing more than screenshots of the install and a default Gnome desktop? Do these people even know what "Enterprise" means? My favorite part is the screenshot of choosing the wallpaper. That's gold. I work for a large ISP which uses Solaris and I know what's Enterprise class and what's not. A series of screenshots of an install is the most pathetic review of an Enterprise product I can imagine. Seeing as most enterprise machines reside in a datacenter rack, without a monitor or keyboard, I don't imagine Gnome is of much interest to many people. You'll probably see a bunch of kids running Oracle Linux on their moms PC and proclaiming: "I am enterprise class! Excuse me while I reboot into windows to play WoW..."
I don't think Oracle linux isn't enterprise class, I just think linux suffers a stigma of gross amateurism.
Why do all the modded up replies to the OP have the phrase YMMV in them?
http://www.redhat.com/promo/unfakeable/
Read the article for a good reason why their support will have no essential benefit over RedHat support.
Why bother.
First, I couldn't agree more that installing Oracle on linux being a total PITA. There're some truly arcane and painful steps in there. The database truly lost its luster for me years ago after I found out how great MySql and Postgres could be.
But how about the Oracle application server? A truly horrendous piece of shit that makes most SAP installations look like pure genius. One of the big "selling points" of their App server was that it used "the open source Apache web server". Oh joy.
This was great until the chunked encoding bug came out with Apache. I was caught supporting several external instances and they were fully vulnerable. No problem , it's Apache right , just fix it ourselves? Wrong, the custom modules are closed source, so you can't compile them for the upgraded version.
To add pain and suffering, Oracle said they had to do a full regression test on any fix and estimated a delivery time of something like four to six weeks for a fix. Their solution? Just turn it off to the outside. Firewall it off. Lovely. What we finally had to do was install a proxy in front of their web server.
I'd love to see how they treat any potential security issues. What a security fiasco. I really hate the fact that Red Hat has to suffer stock price loss as a result of the 500 pound ape throwing its idiotic weight around. This is just a security and performance fiasco waiting to happen.
Something called Raw Iron. Think it was based on Solaris but it was a plug-n-play DB + server. Never caught on and it was quietly strangled I believe at the end of the 90s.
" really hate the fact that Red Hat has to suffer stock price loss as a result of the 500 pound ape throwing its idiotic weight around."
Red Hat derives its business from code that was 99% written by people who do not work for it and never did. If it wasn't for the work many hundreds (thousands) or people put in for nothing they wouldn't exist. Did they really think they'd be the top dog in the linux food chain and no one would ever use *their* work for financial gain in turn? Too bad if they did because now they're about to discover just how relying on open source software as your sole earner can bite you badly.
Here is a thought folks - Oracle is more worried about MySQL steeling market share than anything - the model oracle is tuning into sounds pretty damn familiar to what the MySQL boyz having been doing for quite sometime. hmmmmm.......
I mean, Oracle, doesn't even support direct SQL queries. They are like poison to Oracle.
and it is funny HP is selling a lot of their giant servers (128GB memory, 128-256 processors, 28 TB yes TB of storage) for use in customer datacenters. And oracle is NOT the DB that the customers are using.
I have seen 10 different setups of these massive systems and they are all for ms sql 2005. Why? I keep on asking that question. Oracle does have better hardware support, then again oracle runs best when it has loaded the driver for the hardware in the box. I really want to know why companies are spending millions for an ms solution. It is freaking scary.
I'm CTO of a small but growing just-barely-post-startup. (EG: We're profitable, and growing fast)
For me, Oracle is a non-starter. It's big, expensive, and reportedly has a high management overhead. So why would I bother?
So far, I've seen massive growth easily and handily supported by PostgreSQL. It's been rock-solid, very stable, secure, and installation consisted of typing two commands:
yum install postgresql-server;
service postgresql start;
We're experimenting with Slony PG clustering, with the intention of rolling that out over Christmas break. (when nobody's looking) Currently, we're snapshotting and mirroring databases hourly, but we want real-time failover...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I recently installed Oracle XE on SuSE 10.0 (the free download version of SuSE) and it installed and ran perfectly fine. It just simply worked.
./configure and make install either. You really need to grok Oracle to a fair degree before you really have any business fooling around with it.
Do the full-blown versions... (Standard, Enterprise, etc) of 10g Release 2 for Linux have some problem that I'm not aware of, or is it just Oracle's usual steep learning curve that's the issue? Installing and running Oracle on *any* platform is not for the faint of heart. It certainly ain't like a Winblowz app that you pop the CD into the drive and run setup and click thru all the defaults and have everything all warm and happy.... it ain't like a typical open source product either that you simply unpack the tarball, run
They will really only need to support the host OS as long as the resident DB is supported. As a practical matter, I would expect the only reason somebody to use Oracle Enterprise Linux is as a platform for the Oracle DB and Application Server. Now those are only "certified" and supported on certain platforms. For example, IIRC, when Oracle 8 was end-of-lifed, AIX 4.x was not certified for Oracle 9i, so in order to continue to run a supported Oracle install, you had to upgrade to AIX 5L along with Oracle 9i. The same thing will probably happen with their Linux distrubition. Oracle Linux versions 1 and 2 might be certificed for Oracle 10g, but the future Oracle 12 might require Oracle Linux 3 or 4. So when they end-of-life 10g, you will also be required to upgrade the Linux install too. When the DB gets upgraded, the OS will get upgraded too.
Also, this will simply their support system and bring down cost because they will have a single linux (RHEL/Oracle EL) to support the DB on.
I don't think Oracle linux isn't enterprise class, I just think linux suffers a stigma of gross amateurism.
I'm Unix administrator in Fortune 200 company so I guess I should know what Enterprise class is. Did you happen to see the list of other partners who joined the Unbreakable Linux program? Have a look. Hmm.. let's see. HP, IBM, EMC, BMC..etc.
Linux with EMC Symmetrix high end fibre channel storage support, Linux with HP Service Guard mission critical high availability cluster management software, Linux with BMC enterprise class system monitoring tools... Hmm, well, I'd say that's pretty Enterprise class - in fact, that's as much of Enterprise class as you can possibly get today. All these solutions I mentioned have been implemented in Linux today - they are right here, right now. We're not talking about future.
Kill the share price and buy yourself a nice Red Hat.
It's not that they like commercial software per se, or that they don't know or understand the benefits of open-source software.
Actually, there ARE sonme segments of the market that is still enamoured with all things Microsoft. Yes, when compared to many alternatives Microsoft is garbage but that doesn't matter. Microsoft solutions are typically like McDonalds food...fast and easy, and when you are hungry and don't have much extra cash it tastes good. Also like McDonalds food, if you only have Microsoft your enterprise will get stomach aches, get fat and bloated and have health problems.
So what markets are hooked on Microsoft? Small and medium enterprises mostly, and operations heavy with automation (factories, refineries and so on--except for REAL mission critical stuff like aerospace, nuclear power generation etc). In other words, the "lower-to-middle class" of the enterprise space. Kind of like how low-to-middle-class America is hooked on fast food. And guess what? Not only are these enterprises hooked on "MS Junk food", they are also poorly informed on the benefits of "proper nutrition" (alternative solutions such as Free software, etc).
These large companies would be happy to bring Linux in-house as long as a larger company offers some kind of indemnification clause in their contracts.
That is not what makes large companies happy. The straight license agreement for Microsoft products offers NO indemnification WHATSOEVER. It doesn't even offer a proper warranty! The best you could ever hope for is replecement of defective media. To get indemnification requires a special contract with the vendor regardless of the nature of the software. The "fast food addicts" (which are the largest segment of business customers) don't have the money or legal resources to obtain such indemnification, except for perhaps a small handful of very critical systems. Thankfully, SMEs are rarely on the radar of "litigious bastards" like SCO.
As for REAL large companies that DO have the money and desire for indemnification, what makes them happy is that their vendor is big and established and rich too. Birds of a feather. In any case, this is ALREADY the most successful market for Linux and the one that presents the most challenges for MS. IBM, Sun, Red Hat, Oracle, Novell all are "big company" linux/Unix vendors and can all offer indemnification like MS so it is not the issue. What the issue is is simply that MS products are inferior. They are the biggest consumers of resources, least scalable, largest target of malicious attacks.
Many large companies offer Linux distributions and absorb the indemnification. It's no wonder then that superior distributions like Ubuntu aren't on the enterprise shopping list: there is little or no viable indemnification offered.
Indemnification is not the reason behind Ubuntu's lack of presence in large enterprises. The reason is that Ubuntu didin't come into being as an "enterprise-class OS". It was designed and targeted for personal/workstation use. Yes, it COULD be a capable enterprise OS, with packages installed to support big server installs but in that arena Ubunto is still very unproven. Also, Canonical isn't a big, established player corporately, popularity of its OS notwithstanding, so it isn't the ability to provide "big company support" but rather that it is a "smaller unproven vendor".
It creates more competition for IBM, who perhaps now will actually push for real Linux offerings that work, for Novell with SuSe, for Sun and Solaris, and it opens the door for upstarts like Canonical who are well-positioned to make Ubuntu a household name. Last, it will open doors to Linux that would otherwise remain shut. Oracle Linux marks the maturity phase of the first round of consolidation and is the harbinger of the next distribution wars.
I'm all up for more competition, and it is possible for a "re-spun Red Hat" OS to emerge as an independent contender in its own right (that is what happened to M
RPM (the FOSS formerly known as Red Hat Package Manager).
Actually, Red Hat has contributed millions of lines of code to linux and related free and/or open source projects, and for a while at least they paid Alan Cox to do what ever he wants. But RPM is pretty obviously a huge contribution of time and effort by itself, regardless of whether you like any Red Hat products or not. There are many, many RPM-based distributions.
Hey, Doc Ruby just trolled me!
I agree with the assertations about Oracle Application Server - part of my job is administering it, and it's a shocking piece of junk at times. I really think that's why they wanted Jboss, they can see how much better the code is than their own offering :)
Oracle database is great, but it will be surpassed in the future by open source databases like Postgres and MySQL (both of which are also excellent databases.) The reason it costs so much, is because it makes people feel good that it costs so much - indeedd costs so much, because if it cost less, less people would buy it. Bizarre logic, but it's the way some people think! (especially IT managers in big organisations).
Very few people who make the purchasing decisions actually have any technical knowledge of the product they are buying. Oracle will do well out of this move since it allows old fashioned IT managers to buy into Linux without really buying into Linux. They can stay in that comfortable place where they sleep well at night. They say no one ever got fired for buying IBM. No one ever got fired for buying Oracle either, regardless of how much it costs, or how well it works. Despite Red Hat being a well known company, they're still a little too 'edgy' for some sections of the IT community. It doesn't matter that it's the same code...it has the Oracle logo on it now :)
mod up!
My take on this is simple. My organization owns 10s of thousands of dollars worth of Redhat licenses. We have never (and I really mean never) gotten either timely or useful support from Red Hat. In other words, Red Hat support sucks. We also own several Oracle licenses. We have never gotten reasonable support from Oracle either. So, Oracle support sucks too. I might as well buy support that sucks for half the price.
Check out this post http://www.theciocompanion.com/
So, is this a CentOS or a real fork? It sounds more like a fork, which doesn't sound like a good idea. Oracle should have licensed the OS from RedHat and then provided a package deal.
Oh Big Larr, so excited about linux but no way to harness it. Thank got they didn't buy Novell.
-m
http://www.invisik.com
It's preposterous to see companies like Oracle try to muscle their way into the Open Source software movement after decades of charging obscene license fees and support costs. Any fool can see what Oracle knows: that mySQL will eat Oracle's lunch within 5 years. How can Oracle survive when they are no longer able to rape their customers? Hopefully it will pull the rug out from under that windbag, Ellison. I know that there are many enterprise level customers that are in bed with Oracle. However, there is a finite amount of time that executives and shareholders will put up with throwing away money just for the "right to use" software they already paid for, getting charged ridiculous (and, IMHO, fraudulent) per-user license fees and other outrageous practices that have been standard operating procedure for companies like Oracle for years. As programs like mySQL gain critical mass and develop all the features of Oracle's database, the paradigm will shift and enterprise software managers will stop worrying about getting fired for deciding to go off Oracle and they will start worrying about getting fired for continuing to get ripped off by Oracle when there is an option like mySQL.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it