Will Red Hat Survive?

An anonymous reader writes "Red Herring has an in-depth analysis interviewing industry experts on what the future of Linux distributor Red Hat will likely be now that Oracle is offering cheaper support and services essentially identical to Red Hat Linux. Will Oracle purchase Red Hat? Or is it not yet too late?" From the article: "Mr. Dargo countered that Oracle's move indicated a lack of understanding of the value that Red Hat's support and service provide. But he noted that Red Hat could be vulnerable if Oracle manages to provide better service. 'If the strategy at Oracle works out, Red Hat is going to face some serious issues, but I don't think it is going to work out,' he said. 'There are lots of opportunities for Red Hat to do some aggressive and creative things to turn around.'"

Comments

They Don't Get It

[capt.Hij]

From the article:

Enterprise Applications Consulting analyst Joshua Greenbaum said Oracle's gambit puts Red Hat in a "very dangerous position" because it doesn't own intellectual property and is just offering services.

First, Oracle is not offering the same thing as Redhat. They do not have the same kind of support. Second, Redhat owns something better than intellectual property. They have kernel and application programers. They have the people who can offer customized support and insight that few can match. Third, Redhat understands and cares about open source. Despite what a few whiners around here say, Redhat supports the community and takes on people who attack it. They have built tremendous good will. I can't see Larry going after people who attack the GPL. Larry only cares about Larry and Japanese statuary.

Re:They Don't Get It

[Znork]

One has to wonder at Mr. Greenbaums analysis. Red Hat is used to not owning exclusive IP and competing on a level playing field. Oracle isn't; it's whole operation is used to the protection of exclusivity. I fail to see any dangerous position.

I wonder if Larry has really thought this through; offering Red Hats patches developed for Red Hats customers but two days later isnt a compelling sales argument so what will Oracle do when Oracles customers report bugs to Oracle? Report the bugs to Red Hat and hope they fix them? Or fix them themselves, and submit the patches upstream to Red Hat? Either their customers risk being left high and dry, or Oracle will be doing Red Hats work for them, just as much as the other way around.

"I can't see Larry going after people who attack the GPL"

But maybe we'll see Larry going after the GPL, once he realizes that Red Hat can freeload right back at him.

Re:Prices

[chabotc]

> may the best distro win.

Umm in both cases the 'distro' is Redhat Enterprise ...

if oracle's distro wins to much, they will have killed their 'upstream' distro provider, and who's patches and fixes and developments can they then "follow, releasing our updates only a day later".

Anyhow, it is a very healthy vote of confidence in RHES, it seems to become the 'new' LSB .. But lets hope oracle is smart enough not to kill their supplier :-)

Re:Prices

[jkrise]

"may the best distro win."

RedHat is much more than yet another distro... though it's the biggest distro by a distance. And a database is not the only thing that a distro is used for....

How can one trust Oracle to look after businesses developed and serviced by RedHat - that has NOTHING to do with databases at all? Or even middleware / ERP?

Can't stop laughing

[Captain Kirk]

Oracle and "cheap" in same sentence. What next? Microsoft and "gentle"? IBM and "modest"? Enron and "due diligence"?

Seriously, Oracle is never going to be a cheap solution in any market. They claim to be an enterprise software vendor. They charge prices that allow them to provide enterprise solutions very profitably. Oracle clients do not care about the price because they run their business more profitably on Oracle software. In many comapnies, small projects are developed in bitty things like MS Access and then ported to Oracle when they have proven a good idea. Getting your app an Oracle back-end was seen as proof you did a great job when I was contracting at Vodafone for example.

The very fact that they have the Oracle brand behind them means they can and will be the most expensive provider of enterprise level support of Linux.

Unless Red Hat has some aspiration to be more expensive than Oracle, the arrival of Oracle in the market can only be good news as it will grow the overall marketplace.

Never mind Red Hat...

[melonman]

Surely the bigger loser here is Novell. Oracle is competing with Red Hat for support of RHEL, but then Red Hat never had the monopoly in that market anyway: plenty of people used Red Hat without paying for AS-quality support. What this move does do is make the Red Hat flavour of Linux even more clearly the mainstream enterprise distribution. How well Red Hat will cope with competition from Oracle in offering support for that product remains to be seen, but I'd have thought that selling a non-Red Hat flavour of Linux to an IT department suddenly got a whole lot harder.