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)."

Comments

That's great!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:That's great!

[montyzooooma]

"And while they are busy pummeling each other Ubuntu will take the lead."

In the enterprise server business? That doesn't seem all that likely...

Re:That's great!

[lucabrasi999]

First of all, Sun is no longer a server powerhouse. So, they are a poor example.

Second of all, you obviously have never worked in a large enterprise. In large enterprises, they pay millions of dollars for critical applications. The last thing a large enterprise would want to depend on is some teenager providing free support on an IRC channel. In addition, if I am running SAP/Oracle or some other critical vendor application, I would only install it on an operating system that is actually supported by the vendor. The last time I checked my present client's PeopleSoft (now Oracle) support policy, Ubuntu was no where to be found. Hell, they only had a few Red Hat options. I doubt I could find more than a handful of enterprise applications that support Ubuntu.

Oracle is dreaming

[t482]

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

Re:Oracle is dreaming

[burnin1965]

1) Things will go on as normal

Couldn't have said it better myself.

When Novell purchased SuSE supposedly Red Hat was doomed because Novell was better positioned to bring linux to the enterprise. Red Hat continued to be the leading provider of linux to the enterprise.

When Sun open sourced Solaris Red Hat was doomed because Sun knows the enterprise and Solaris is a better linux than linux. Red Hat continued to be the leading provider of linux to the enterprise.

When Sun annouced that they would make Ubuntu linux enterprise ready then linux would finally be ready for the enterprise and Red Hat's end was near. And Red Hat continued to be the leading provider of linux to the enterprise.

Now Ellison's monsterous ego is lumbering through the market hunting down Red Hat to finally squash it because Oracle has ... lots of money. And guess what will happen, Red Hat will continue to be the leading provider of linux to the enterprise.

I think the key commonality in all these situations is that we have three closed source proprietary vendors who have been forced into accepting open source, sometimes kicking and screaming, as a significant part of the software stack their businesses rely on, but in the case of Red Hat they are an open source company.

Oh, and just as a side note for anyone reading this, that article started off with quite the ignorant flaimbait claims. Oracle cannot and will not be removing Red Hat copyrights from linux, they will be removing trademarks. Red Hat has licensed their copyrights on the code under the GPL and those copyrights will remain. And I'm not so sure about the author's claim that Red Hat said there would be hardware incompatibility, I think what they said is any changes to the code in the distribution would invalidate any certifications.

burnin

Re:Was I the only one who thought...

[Chelloveck]

Awww gee... Everyone knows that the Enterpise computers run Vista.. ;-)

Nah, MacOS. Don't you remember Star Trek IV: Save The Whales?

"A keyboard. How... quaint."

Oracle might succeed if...

[vhogemann]

..they drop this "Enterprize Linux" idea, and instead focus on a Appliance approach.

As I pointed before (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=203218&cid=16 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.

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!