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: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?