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.

Why Oracle must be stopped....

[jkrise]

RHEL might be the biggest Linux OS for (supported) Oracle deployments, but RedHat is much more than just an RHEL or Linux services company. In fact, one could argue that the success of RedHat Linux and the JBoss / JEMS platform might indeed be a serious threat to Oracle's survival... once other databases are made part of RedHat's application stack.

By undercutting and subsequently angling for a takeover of RedHat, Oracle is getting into a business which is not beneficial to customers and end-users.... the focal point of the entire Open Source and Free Software movements.

If Oracle wants to offer support Linux-based database solutions, it ought to come up with it's own distro. NOT kill RedHat.. the no. 1 distro. What would happen to RedHat's non-database successes... middleware, applications, hardware collaboration, education and research, training and services... solutions partners etc.? It would appear these are threats to Oracle's long-term survival.. but they are the most valuable things for customers (not just servers and infrastructure).

HP took over Compaq took over Digital... and now, the Unix businesses of Compaq and Digital (both very valuable for customers) have been lost forever.

Oracle might compete... but must not be allowed to takeover RedHat. In many ways they are bigger stumbling blocks to the Open Source revolution than even Microsoft.

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?

Re:Prices

[OffTheLip]

Red Hat charges a premium for RHEL AS, less for ES and WS is priced similarly to Microsoft products. Fedora on the other hand is free. I don't see a problem here. What RHEL does for business and government is offer a validated, supported and, most important for my organization, certfied product. RHEL4 is Common Criteria Scheme certified at CAPP/EAL4+. This means we can use it without justification something we can not do currently with Fedora or the new Oracle offering for that matter.

Probably not

[cpbrown]

I don't think that it will. It is one of the original heavyweights but in the face of newer and more specialised distros it no longer occupies a suitably small niche in order to ensure its long term continuation.
In my opinion, most serious developers will keep to a lighter distro, and most newbies will keep to a nice flowery distro such as Ubuntu, which prides itself on ease of use. Red Hat is no longer necesarry. Compettition will inevitably drive it away in the ever dynamic food-web of free software.

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.

Re:Prices

[vhogemann]

And Oracle didn't made a good job copying RHEL either...

From the screenshots I've looked at, they couldn't even manage to get the icons right: http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/sc reenshots/scaled/Oracle%20Enterprise%20Linux%20R4- U4/36.gif

Also... why ship X11 at all? This Oracle Enterprize Linux should be focused at the server-side, shipping with a pre-installed Oracle DB, an Java EJB Container, and a nice web-based console to administrate all that.

It would be a much smarter move to partner with RH and a hardware vendor to push an Oracle Appliance to the market. Plug it, configure some basic parameters via web interface, and start using! This would add something to Oracle, simplicity, something that they currently lack, and that could make a difference aggainst the competing DB products.

I don't know if Oracle actually has the expertise to sell support, and mantain, a linux distribution. Their first attempt at putting one thogether is patetic.

A market for both

[uslinux.net]

There are plenty of companies which are concerned with nothing but the best price for their support. Usually these are small companies, though sometimes they are larger ones too. Companies *really* concerned about cost ignore companies like Oracle and instead run Debian, SuSE, White Box, or some other distro. If they need support, they tend to find the least expensive, small consulting firm they can (like mine). The ones that believe "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" will likely consider Oracle.

But, the big companies will stick with Red Hat. Why? Simple. When they have an issue with an application, Red Hat has engineers which troubleshoot the problem, fix it, then release a new package. Sure, Oracle *could* do that, but can they get Red Hat to accept the patches? More importantly, will they just say "sorry, that's a bug in the vendor's software"? Red Hat has engineers who are dedicated to patching and improving the OS.

That said, the large companies are likely to exert a bit of muscle to get a better deal on their Red Hat contracts by comparing the Red Hat support costs to Oracle. In the end, this will certainly cost Red Hat some revenue, but I don't personally see it as dire as wall street did on Thursday. And in the end, the marketis certainly big enough that Oracle could end up having a positive influence on Red Hat's market share, as yet another company advocated Linux to the masses.