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Oracle and Red Hat begin battle for the Enterprise
Salvance writes "Yahoo News (via ComputerWire) is reporting that Oracle and Red Hat are turning up the heat in the battle over Oracle's new enterprise Linux offering. While Oracle claims they'll be able to offer their 'Unbreakable' version of Red Hat's Linux offering for half the price, Red Hat asserts that all the important security and hardware certifications would be invalidated on Oracle's offering.
At this point, the only thing that's certain is that Red Hat needs to figure out how to keep their large Oracle Enterprise clients on board or risk becoming a takeover target (undoubtably, with Oracle leading the list of potentially bidders)."
At this point, the only thing that's certain is that Red Hat needs to figure out how to keep their large Oracle Enterprise clients on board or risk becoming a takeover target (undoubtably, with Oracle leading the list of potentially bidders)."
Man, Cpt Kirk's not going to like that!
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
And while they are busy pummeling each other Ubuntu will take the lead. As a former alienated Red Hat user I am glad Red Hat is getting some bad karma. Back in the day when Red Hat was free I would regardless go down to CompUSA and buy a copy to support them. Then they came out with this Fedora/Red Hat model where they aren't willing to eat their own dog food. I have installed Fedora numerous times only to be disappointed with the number of bugs in a very obvious unfinished product. I know the latest release of Ubuntu has had its issues, but I haven't gone to it as I have been very pleased with Ubuntu LTS. It is the stable version comparable to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but it is available to all and yes I support it via donations.
I know that deep within each of RedHat and Oracle's camp, these two companies agree in this:
It's all about the money, but in my not so humble opinion, I see RedHat as having an uphill battle on this one.
One of Red Hat's arguments is that the security and hardware certs will be voided because of Oracle's changes, most natably the Security cert with the U.S. Governent. But for how long? I don't see it taking that long for Oracle to "make things happen" considering the size and power of the company. If history is any indicator, if Larry Ellison wants something, he'll get it.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
You can't just pull a support infrastructure out of your ass for an Enterprise quality distribution that you didn't put together. Serious Admins arent going to trust this. Database Admins maybe!
Oracle will win in this "battle" because Larry Ellison do everything to get upset Microsoft.
And Oracle have more money than Red Hat
Next up they will be eating the hat.
Let the battle begin! This is great news! Tear yourselves apart! Let's see who the king of the hill is. Is anybody taking any bets?
My bet is - Ubuntu will win. You can not buy Ubuntu. How can you compete with that? Shuttleworth has said he has invested enough money to make sure Ubuntu will be around for as long as we live.
I think some competition will be good for Linux and OSS at this point. Linux distros aren't just a desktop OS, they are an infinitely adaptable and extensible platform, one that I'd like to see taken to new places while these two companies duke it out. I can see this doing good things for enterprise IT, and the general consumer, too. As long as the fight stays in the OSS ring, the best man will win, fighting based on actual merit, without anyone resorting to proprietary licenses, patents, or lawsuits (hopefully).
Also note that while Microsoft further locks down what ISV's can do with their platform, yet another formidable company picks up the Linux gauntlet...
Let me get this straight? Oracle will use an altered version of Red Hat to beat Red Hat? wouldnt this prove that Oracle succeeded *because* the Red Hat distribution works?
See Red Hat's patent policy. Consider their "promise": Red Hat agrees to refrain from enforcing the infringed patent. It's not a license, it's not irrevocable, it's not even a hard promise: it's just an indication that the present owners of Red Hat probably won't sue you for infringing their patents today.
So, does anyone think that Oracle will feel bound by this "promise" if they buy Red Hat?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
In the end we'll have some free, open source OS released under the supervision of a giant corp. Just what we wanted.
US patent office. Think what is going to happen.
Round One: RedHat introduces some great innovation, just to diffrentiate from Oracle and patents it.
round Two: They say that Oracle Linux is no longer compatible with RedHat. Just for marketing purposes. And to convince management folks in big companies around the world that RedHat and Oracle ARE NOT THE SAME.
Round Three: And what now? Sue the b*stards! Question is who is going to sue whom? If Oracle releases something based on patented idea - RedHat. Or Oracle will try to 'protect' OSS community from patents.
General lot of politics. What means for us fun to watch. Of course as long as you're not administering RedHat network. I feel your pain.
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
We have started to use FreeBSD and PostgreSQL for our enterprise operations.
Basically, we have found that FreeBSD 6 scales better than Linux on the multiprocessor Opteron hardware we're currently using. Running Java EE 5 via FreeBSD's Linux binary emulation, we were able to consolidate onto one server several web applications that we previously had to run on several separate Linux systems. What's more, the average load of our new system is just under half that of the previous Linux installations, even though the hardware is exactly the same.
We've also started using PostgreSQL lately. We had been using a mix of various commercial SQL server softwares, but transitioned several of our DB servers over to PostgreSQL. We noticed immediate performance improvements. One particular system can now handle 300% more transactions per second than it could when using the previous, commercial database system.
We really don't care what Oracle and Red Hat do. Let them battle for our purchases all they want. We'll be sticking with FreeBSD and PostgreSQL, because they get the job done efficiently and effectively.
Time to hit Larry Ellison where it hurts. That scumbag has always got what he wanted. It's just too much for one man to have it all. Red Hat will be the winner in the OSS boxing ring!
. . . for the nine circles of Oracle Support hell.
What?
*throws hands in air and runs away, screaming*
Using Ubuntu on an enterprise server is about as appealing as using Gentoo (On anything).
I don't think Red Hat's financial model relies much on people who used to buy a set of CDs for their home computer, and Oracle is even less interested in that market. The real money is in selling ES contracts to ISPs with hundreds or thousands of machines, or, especially, AS contracts with big companies.
As for RHEL/Fedora, I've been running RHEL on all my machines for the last couple of years, recently tried Fedora Core 5, and I'm no wondering why I wouldn't switch to that for most of my office machines (having one local machine running the same build as my leased webservers is IMO worth the money). I keep my downloaded Fedora CDs in one of my Red Hat 7.0 envelope for old time's sake...
And the reason it will take a lot to make me consider moving to Ubuntu or any other distro is simply that I can't bear the thought of going through the "where have they hidden this config file?" experience another time. If I'd gone with the trends as suggested by /. headlines, I would have moved from Red Hat to Mandrake to Gentoo to Ubuntu in the last four years, learned far more about the gnostic secrets of Linux than I ever want to learn, and been half as productive at my job (application programming) as a result. "Better the devil you know" counts for a lot for many OS users.
Virtually serving coffee
If they think that their sales people will be worried about $1000 operating systems when they are selling $1 million dollar software packages (Big Iron Oracle @ 50K a CPU or Siebel).
Nothing will happen - and if you jumped into RH stock you could have made a quick 15% as it over reacted to the news.
1) Things will go on as normal - RH has more to fear from Ubuntu (teamed up with say IBM or HP)
2) Oracle will make noise and keep seeing their DB market share be destroyed by MS SQL server (which is cheap and good enough for many applications)
3) Oracle will go back to hocking APP servers - and making those buying the server buy Oracle DBs.
4) Redhat will have moderate success selling a beefed up Postgresql
It has always seemed relatively obvious to me that most OSS software companies are vulnerable to this type of attack mounted by a large proprietary software vendor. Take the software (which, at the end of the day is where the real value is), and offer support, but without undertaking any of the major development tasks (only do bugfixes). The OSS competitor has two choices: continue to do R&D work on the product, to keep it advancing, and accepting that they can't sell support as cheaply as the "bug-fix only" proprietary vendor, or stop doing R&D themselves, so that they can be cost-competitive. Of course the disadvantage of this approach is that the product quickly falls behind proprietary offerings....
This is not going to be an easy battle for Redhat. I suspect they are going to have to find a new business model if they are to survive.
There's been a fair amount about this in the news recently (and by 'news' I mean slashdot) but it's been discussed and kicked around in some rather interesting detail elsewhere also. Oracle seems to be pulling from other projects already involved in RHEL rebuilds like centos. They're not even bothering to clean up some of the centos release tags. See http://oss.oracle.com/linux/legal/oracle-list.html for verification and look at the artwork package to see what I'm talking about.
t ible-linux/ and a comment to that post http://ultramookie.com/wayback/2006/10/26/uncompat ible-linux/#comment-5386 for all the gory details on this.
So far I'm completely unimpressed with oracle's offering, and they'd better get their act together if they want this to be anything more than a corporate money-pit. So far it seems rushed, half-baked and unready (not unbreakable). I for one will be sticking with RH for my corporate support, and I will urge others who require redhat support to do the same.
There's also some indication that oracle's initial effort wasn't really tested that thoroughly and has some breakage issues. See http://ultramookie.com/wayback/2006/10/26/uncompa
..they drop this "Enterprize Linux" idea, and instead focus on a Appliance approach.
6 621458), Oracle did a very poor job cloning Fedora. And I really doubt that they have enought in-house knowledge to mantain a full fledged Linux distro.
As I pointed before (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=203218&cid=1
Also, why on earth they want to offer a full distro anyways? It make a lot more sense to build a minimal distro, and wrap it around OracleDB! Every Oracle install out there already uses a dedicated machine, include a OS with the darned thing, and installation will be incredibly simplified. They should be teaming with RedHat, for support and R&D on this slimmed Linux!
Hell, even if they don't want to make business with RedHat, at least hire some CentOS developers to put together a decent distro!
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
Sounds like a resounding win for OSS, and a great reason to follow the OSS business model... NOT!
This was pretty interesting scenario that happened. What amazes me is that NOBODY could see something like this coming! Not even the biggest experts! Not even RMS! Not even the best business analysts could see that somebody could come up with such a masterplan. However, Oracle doesn't realize it will have its own Vietnam with this battle against RedHat.
Anyway - none of this really matters. Proprietary software model is dead anyway, so it really doesn't matter if something like this happens now or a year later. The future is open no matter what. You can fight it as much as you can, but that's the way it's going to be. Better just admit it now and not waste any energy fighting it.
At best, Oracle can start to build their market. To believe the PR spin, you'd think they'd been kernel hackers from say, 1991. In fact, that's not true. While RHEL is competitive, remember that is free-open-source-software, and Oracle makes not a dime from that. Like RH, they'll add services, interesting apps, research, and perhaps a groupie audience with a Fedora-like effort, or that of OpenSUSE.
If you let Oracle achieve their 'marketshare' from thin air, you're doing injustice to hundreds of thousands of coders that have been evolving the kernel, GNU apps, and lots of interesting and useful apps-- that aren't poised strictly to sell a money maker- in this case the Oracle db.
Yes, Oracle has a powerful sales machine, even legendary. That Oracle now deigns fit to 'sanctify' Linux is more of a johnny-come-lately move while MySQL and PGRE eat their lunch. They also face enormous obstacles with IBM and its alliance with SUSE-- especially overseas. Don't let the marketing kiddies fool you.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Not sure if this is a just a coincidence or not, but it looks like Oracle's support system Metalink is unavailable at the moment with the error message:
Urgent: Potential Performance and Login Problems -
Please note that due to heaver than normal activity during peak hours, you may experience performance and login related issues. This is a temporary situation that we are working to resolve.
Someone trying to convince consumers that Oracle Support is not quite up to the task perhaps?
If Oracle is going after the general purpose linux server market, then RedHat has a problem. But I think most people would use Oracle Linux as a platform for Oracle DB, not as a general purpose box. In that case, Oracle will only be taking a small portion of RH's market. Usually, an Oracle installation is on a dedicated machine, so I don't expect to see Oracle Linux serving a lot of public webpages or used as a desktop. The only reason I can think of somebody using Oracle Linux for general purpose is if they have a specific policy of limiting the number of OSes to keep support cost down and they already sunk money into Oracle.
This really hurts Sun, because Solaris is the traditional Oracle platform of choice. Now Linux will be the platform of choice for Oracle. If Oracle makes clustering and failover really easy (as an added value over a simple RH respin), then Sun will take a real beating beause you would be able to replace that good-ol'-solid-and-reliable Sparc monster with a cluster of cheap pre-configured Oracle Linux boxes (instead of buying the next generation of Sun).
The main reason for choosing Red Hat as a distribution is usually the "security and hardware certificatations". Oracle should either find a way of provinding that or otherwise use some other distribution. Debian would certainly profit very much if chosen for this ;-)
You're analysing the future, and as far as I'm aware, the future hasn't happened yet.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Khaaaan!
"No, no, no, don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to."
mark my words! what we have here is oracle's vietnam! it's gonna be a long battle and you can not win. feel free to use "oracle's vietnam" anagram in your publications. these are historical words i said and will be quoted million times thus i want to remain anonymous.
Software Patents will be dead and buried within the next 20 years. A change of government in the USA is likely -- and the new government might decide that software patents are anti-competitive, and annul them all in one fell swoop.
If they ever try to introduce software patents in the EU or UK, where retrospective application of a newly-enacted law is explicitly illegal, every falsely-granted software patent will be null and void -- and the holders will have to reapply for them. Meanwhile, anything that would have infringed those patents ahd they been valid, will now be prior art which can be cited to block the "new" applications.
It's all a mess, and there is only one way out of it: no software patents.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
"but without undertaking any of the major development tasks (only do bugfixes)."
The value of the support is directly related to the level of development. As a customer, once you are hit by a bug, you'd presumably want to get it fixed, and the closer to the development the support provider is, the better they will be at fixing the bugs.
Would you pay Oracle for a support contract, only to find out they're not going to fix your bugs, they'll wait until the upstream does it? Or that they'll fix them bug, but the next resync with upstream will reintroduce it? Or even worse bugs, if the upstream produces incompatible fixes?
Can you even imagine the nightmare of trying to maintain a patch tree while engaged in hostilities towards the upstream? Can you imagine the havoc they could wreck on your patches? Would you volunteer to maintain patches when any upstream change will mean a total reject of your patches, or even worse, subtle changes in variable names and uses that do everything from cause crashes to corrupting data? There's a reason people fork OSS projects.
From what Ellison spouts it sounds like Oracle wants a free ride and has just failed to notice you cant get a free ride. Either Oracle will have to fork completely, or they'll have to maintain an amicable relationship with Red Hat. Which probably means carrying their own weight. Which means that Red Hat gains as much free patches from Oracle as Oracle does from them.
"This is not going to be an easy battle for Redhat."
Oracle offers a subset of Red Hat support at a slight discount. Red Hat offers replacements for much of Oracles stack at a minute fraction of the price. I fail to see why Red Hat would be the one that has anything to be worried about.
I'm not sure I do unless RH is harmed to the point that it no longer can support or develop any code that ISN'T joined at the hip to Oracle applications. See? I really don't care either way unless my RH servers can no longer support anyone else's application because let's face facts - it's unlikely that Oracle will make generalized RH code that is 'best' for Oracle apps and 'best' for everyone else too. In other words isn't this going to result in another RH fork?
``It has always seemed relatively obvious to me that most OSS software companies are vulnerable to this type of attack mounted by a large proprietary software vendor. Take the software (which, at the end of the day is where the real value is),''
I'm not so sure the real value is in the software. People and, especially, companies seem to be willing to pay more for support contracts than for software. They'll even take inferior software over superior software if they can get a support contract that way.
``and offer support, but without undertaking any of the major development tasks (only do bugfixes).
The OSS competitor has two choices: continue to do R&D work on the product, to keep it advancing, and accepting that they can't sell support as cheaply as the "bug-fix only" proprietary vendor, or stop doing R&D themselves, so that they can be cost-competitive. Of course the disadvantage of this approach is that the product quickly falls behind proprietary offerings....''
The "bug-fix only" vendor has the same problem: if nobody does R&D on the product, eventually, nobody will want to pay even for the support contracts. So they have an incentive to continue the R&D.
Also, when the product is under the GPL, everyone enhancing it and distributing the enhanced version is required to make the enhancements available to the world, so R&D will continue as long as _someone_ is doing the work. The incentive for doing the work may be other than monetary, and, in fact, a lot of what OSS is today has been done by volunteers.
``This is not going to be an easy battle for Redhat. I suspect they are going to have to find a new business model if they are to survive.''
They can, and do, include proprietary code in their product and charge for that.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Software Patents will be dead and buried within the next 20 years. A change of government in the USA is likely -- and the new government might decide that software patents are anti-competitive, and annul them all in one fell swoop.
What color is the sky in your world?
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
The one thing that most of you have in common with Larry Ellison is that you're a bunch of idiots. Yeah, I know he is worth 20 billion USD and I am worth about 20 dollars. Irrespective.
Companies are not going to switch to Oracle support simply because Larry says it's a couple of hundred dollars cheaper. Oracle has no presence in Linux, no history to speak of. Why should anyone trust them? Remember their "Unbreakable" compaign, their "war" with BEA over app servers? Where is that now? It's irrelevent, WebSphere has quietly overtaken the J2EE market right under Oracle's nose, how many companies have migrated their infrstructure to Oracle thanks to its unbreakable campaign? Virtually none.
Oracle is doing this to spite Redhat, why, because Redhat bought JBoss and that got under Larry's skin. If you move your IT infrastructure to Oracle knowing they are providing a service out of spite then you don't have much future in this industry.
Who is that pot smoker posting that this is bad new for Sun? Which idiot CTO is going to migrate a multi million dollar Oracle data centre installation to an unproven distribution with an unproven support service? If this was your dinky toy php mysql website then you have a point, but a data centre? Please, we will talk when you are sober again.
I can also imagine the Oracle sales reps falling over themselves to sell Linux support. Imagine last week you sold a support contract to BigBankXXX for $ 50 000 per CPU core - this week you just sold a Linux support contract to BigBankYYY for $ 99 per server. Yipeee!!!
Put yourself in a CTO's position, sure they think Oracle support on Linux is a good thing, then they look at their Oracle installations and remember the licence fees they pay. Then they look at the Oracle DBA's and remember the huge amount they have to pay to support the DB. Then they think again - that's all Redhat needs.
All your database are belong to Oracle!
There are many people reading this who have the skills necessary to work on Linux as an Oracle employee. My question is: would you consider it? I've interviewed a fair number of Oracle employees in the past 6 months and many of them complain that the corporate headquarters in Redwood Shores is no longer a place to innovate. Most software development is now being done in India. The Redwood Shores staff is mostly engaged in integrating technology from the constant stream of acquisitions.
Think of it this way - if someone gives you Fedora without support, you can probably still do what you needed to do. If someone gives you Redhat Support, without actually giving you Redhat, you can't do anything except talk to the Support Line all day. That's what I meant by the value really being in the software.
As for development, the thing is that Oracle can cheat. Do bugfixes, writing test cases for each bug fixed as you go. Do this for two years, then go and pilfer the OSS community again a couple of years later, when you want a new release. If Oracle plays it's cards right, they will have submitted bug reports to the OSS community along the way, along with their own fixes.... A good percentage of those are going to get picked up in the official OSS code.
When the time to create a new release comes, they run the test cases to identify if known bugs have been "re-introduced". Those should be relatively quick to fix, and Oracle gets to stay relatively close to the latest stuff out there.
IMO, this is manageable, and way cheaper than doing the R&D type stuff that Redhat does for Linux.
I'm not so sure the real value is in the software. People and, especially, companies seem to be willing to pay more for support contracts than for software. They'll even take inferior software over superior software if they can get a support contract that way.
I own a small-ish business. In no way, shape, or form, is support more important to me than quality software. If I have to make support calls, that's lost time and money. The second software malfunctions, is the second you start losing money. No question about it. I will pay multiples more for a product that requires little to no support, than I will for a product that has good support.
The only reason a product needs support is because it's not good enough to be used without support. So by definition, a better product requires less support than a product (that does the same thing) that requires support. There's no value in support. Support is purely a cost, and an avoidable one at that.
In the case of somebody like Red Hat, there's simply no way I'd ever use the product (at least for our desktops... our server stuff is outsourced). I don't care if I can get a literate, English speaking person on the phone instantly 24/7 via a toll-free number. I don't care if the company will teleport a support person to my company within one minute of needing help. That's not nearly as good as using a product that doesn't require support.
Hmm 5 presidential election cycles, 10 congressional cycles and 3.3 Senate cycles... yea Id say a change in government is pretty likely..
they have chosen to just rape Redhat of all their hard work, brand it as their own, and cut Redhat out of the profits
Dare I say it, that is exacty what the GPL allows you to do. So long as Oracle make their changes publically available, then there's no problem with taking that approach. That, by definition, is what forking is.
As other posters point out, Red Hat have moved into the middleware space, bringing them into direct competition with Oracle and Oracle is competing very aggressively to protect not only their middleware business, but ultimately, their database business which is their cash cow. If "Enterprises" decide that there are cost savings to be made using an open source operating system and opensource app servers they might just decide that they should be using open source database servers too. Larry Ellison doesn't care, so long as they (continue to) pay Oracle to do so.
Yeah. Proprietary software is dead! Along with incandescent lightbulbs, the English system, walking, and fossil fuels!
Oh, wait...
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
It does not *beg* the question, it *raises* the question.
And no I won't accept 'modern' usage, dammit I want it to mean what it originally meant.
The question *raised* is probably simply answered by Oracle's marketing having the perception that the linux market is where the growth is. Also, on the technical front linux enjoys a much larger open development community to leverage, whereas Open Solaris doesn't have that much of an attach rate from the community.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Has anyone considered that Oracle is merely pressing down the price of RHAT stock in order to later buy out the company?
This was all settled in Star Trek 3: The Search for Spock.j pg
http://www.thefilmfrontier.com/images/trek03_050.
I guess you could say it ended in a draw...
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
Think of it this way - if someone gives you Fedora without support, you can probably still do what you needed to do. If someone gives you Redhat Support, without actually giving you Redhat, you can't do anything except talk to the Support Line all day. That's what I meant by the value really being in the software.
Your problem is that you only consider the technical side of the argument, that is not how business decisions are taken howver.
No, for some of my customers Fedora is not an option even if it works technically for the simple reason that it lacks certifications they need and because it does not come with the kind of support on which you can build an SLA.
Getting support on a product you are not using makes no sense, so that part of your argument is nonsensical.
I for one, welcome our 'Unbreakable' Overlords.....
In Larry Ellison Dreamland, databases are the dominating factor in datacenters and whoever controls that should control the OS.
Having worked in several datacenters, I can tell you that in most of them databases are important but they are hardly the only application being run. An OS is selected in a datacenter for it's ability to support many applications. My current place of employment is strong on Solaris and RHEL. Would we add a 3rd OS called Unbreakable Linux just because Larry Ellison has a hard-on about OS'es? I don't think so. We have mail-servers and many other applications to support besides just his frigging baby Oracle. I know an Oracle DBA or two who can tell you about their poor security situation so I wouldn't trust them with making UNBREAKABLE anything. But anyhow, if you make hammers I guess you think everybody else uses hammers all day long and that's the most important thing in the world to base your toolbox around.
Many things to think about. 1) Who in the big world will support and drive Linux business? Will IBM work more closely with Oracle because of legacy Oracle DB support? 2) In the client desktop world, we see that it is possbile to dual boot WinXP and Apple on the Intel platform, but which would be easiest - this or Apple/Unbuntu? I am thinking of the consumer market that will need to upgrade to better machines in the next five years (given that current PC hardware dropped off last year, denoting a beginning of market saturation.) So if Oracle offers a "friendly" Linux client, the idea would be to sweep the Linux platform arena. But still... who is going to cahnge their entire platform to something unteste and unproven? Unbreakable has been used before and is not a presence in the market. So is the real question how much FUD can Oracle spread about Red Hat until they become a juicy (and cheap) takeover?
Getting support on a product you are not using makes no sense, so that part of your argument is nonsensical.
Of course it's nonsensical. That's how we know that the value (the real value, the stuff that you can actually use) is in the software, not in the support. It's not me trying to suggest that support is intrinsically valuable, it's you...
I fully understand that there are companies/organisations with procurement policies that insist on support contracts. But all that tells us is that large companies tend to have ignorant fools writing their procurement policies. News at 11....
I find your posting to be interesting. Could you please clarify which version of the Linux kernel you are running. I'd also be interested in which distro (and that version as well).
Thanks.
"the system reboots and you get your first taste of Oracle Linux. It's pink... bright shining pink,[Grub]"
Oracle hasn't just ripped off Red Hat for you see I also have a bright pink Grub...
Sorry I couldn't help myselfFrom the the back of the room
snicker snicker
Don't you hate glorious self-promotion? Visit my Blog
Of course it's nonsensical. That's how we know that the value (the real value, the stuff that you can actually use) is in the software, not in the support. It's not me trying to suggest that support is intrinsically valuable, it's you...
Support on its own has no value, it only has value in combination with whatever is being supported. Since people generally buy support for things they actually use, your point might be true, but has no relevance whatsoever.
" Red Hat asserts that all the important security and hardware certifications would be invalidated on Oracle's offering. "
this is proprietary certification ! Horrible !
Let start a free like beer "redhat certification"
Like the man said, Java has native FreeBSD version, running Java through Linux emulation is only something a moron would do. Or a lier would talk about.
I would considure Mister 'FreeBSD + Postgresql' is both as well as a troll.
I've seen your support and RedHat will continue to get my money.
If you're happy and you know it, think again!
Oracle/Red Hat helped legitimize RH Linux. With PHB's reading stories about Red Hat/Oracle roll-outs I'm sure it helped easing RH into company more racks (I know we've purchased a few RH licenses specifically for this reason).
Partnerships like this are very important in making Red Hat more then just a Apache platform and keeps it on the radar of other enterprise software producers.
Quack, quack.
Do you want to run a distro that slaps a picture of a red hat everywhere or would you rather see a picture of a penguin wearing armor?
Is this the best that we can do folks?
Screw the investments in kernel functionality and performance... three servings of bogo mips for an icon that I can be proud of!
"Red Hat asserts that all the important security and hardware certifications would be invalidated on Oracle's offering."
Whoopdy do! Blah, blah, blah... Who do they think they are? Microsoft?
Just remember, this is what you get folks for paying $$ to certify for a corporate controlled open source product. Never know when someone else is gonna move right in. Helk, everyone shares the same source code! No one's land locked. I guess trying to become the Microsoft of Linux proves to be a bad idea after all.
"They'll keep fighting, and they'll win!"
After the Oracle announcement I downloaded the Oracle "Unbreakable" Enterprise Linux and had to try four hard disk configurations before I found one that would boot after installation. ubuntu-6.06.01 LTS never did that to me. I think given a chance ubuntu will do well. Don't knock it if you haven't tried it.
I too standardized on Red Hat and I bought my copies at CompUSA and purchased service contracts for all my servers and workstations. A while later I received the "end of support" email indicating that two months later when my support contracts were expiring, Red Hat would no longer be supporting my installations because they were going off into the "Enterprise" market. That really pissed me off and I haven't trusted them since. I standardized on their product and paid up, and for my trust, I got what was coming to me. Now they are getting theirs from Oracle, Ha Ha Ha.