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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)."
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 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
Nah, MacOS. Don't you remember Star Trek IV: Save The Whales?
"A keyboard. How... quaint."
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
..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
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.
I think that Oracle is making a bad move here. Instead of partnering with Redhat, to provide a really stable and well working solution, they have chosen to just rape Redhat of all their hard work, brand it as their own, and cut Redhat out of the profits. I think that this may backfire on them. Many users of Redhat use it because it works well with Oracle. However, at this point, if nobody is using Redhat for Oracle, then Redhat may just stop being produced. If it doesn't go that far, we may see Oracle not working so well on Redhat, and the Oracle team, having to make tons of changes to Unbreakable Linux (haven't they got in trouble for making such claims before), just to get their Database to work. What is Oracles plan for providing updates? They can't just pass the updates on the second after Redhat releases them, as they will have to test them on their own distro. I don't think users will take the story that it's Redhat's fault when they release a patch that hoses their system. So, they have to test the updates for a week, then users will be waiting an extra week for the updates. I think it's a little underhanded to try to cut out the people making the operating system that made your product so strong in the first place.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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 ;-)
"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.
``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.
> if nobody is using Redhat for Oracle, then Redhat may just stop being produced.
You think that Oracle wasn't looking for precisely that outcome? Larry Ellison is pissed that Redhat dared move into middleware space by buying JBoss, and now he wants to cut their legs out from under them. It's nothing more or less than a a personal vendetta from Larry Ellison -- this guy makes Steve Ballmer look like Mark Shuttleworth.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Sometimes it is all about the money. So Oracle might get a bigger piece of the pie, who cares? In business its all about the ROI and SLA. A few things we know: 1. You will need a database. If the company standard is Oracle or the application is cert'd for Oracle, you will run Oracle. 2. You need support for the entire stack. Who cares where you get support from as long as you can meet your SLA's and ROI. 3. You need an OS to run your database. Why not use Enterprise Linux from Oracle if the database from #1 is cert'd for Enterprise Linux and they can fully support it. Many people are missing the point of Oracle coming out with Unbreakable Linux and Enterprise Linux. If Oracle customers are needing an OS to run Oracle, why not have Oracle support it. No finger pointing between vendors. If Oracle can support Linux cheaper and quicker, the ROI is realized quicker, which keeps the C-Level people happy while meeting the SLA's of the business unit paying the bills. For Oracle they keep more of the pie. Plus with RAC, UBL, and Enterprise Linux, most of the stack is now a comodity. Check out http://www.theciocompanion.com/ for my other posts on this.