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Red Hat Dismisses Threat Posed by Oracle and MS
Rob writes "Red Hat Inc's executive vice president of worldwide sales, Alex Pinchev, has dismissed
the impact that Oracle Corp's entry into the Linux support business could have on Red Hat,
insisting Oracle does not really know what it is doing. Pinchev also described Microsoft's
recent interoperability and patent peace deal with Novell Inc as a "non-event"
and dismissed the suggestion that Linux users
are at risk of a patent infringement lawsuit from Redmond."
And...
If you're running CentOS, how can you possibly say you've "lost interest in Red Hat"? The two are not compatible, CentOS for all practical purposes is Red Hat without the support contract. Same OS under the hood.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
"This would be a configuration that's not supported by Oracle, so you're on your own if you have serious technical difficulties that you don't have immediate answers for and cannot be solved by googling for answers"
While that is true, how would Oracle know?
I run RHEL and Oracle on my production servers and CentOS and Oracle on my dev/test servers. When Oracle asks, the configuration is RHEL and Oracle, even though 99% of the time the problem has occurred on dev/test. I haven't seen a problem yet that occurs on CentOS that doesn't also occur on RHEL, they are the same OS, just compiled by different groups.
'Would you sue your own customers? I wouldn't and I don't believe Microsoft will ever do it,"...
I think he is giving Microsoft too much credit, like any other large corporation that is facing struggling sales (cough,RIAA,cough), Microsoft has proven they will do *anything* they can to get a sale (including threatening their own customers).
For those paying attention, the clues are all around that Microsoft has in fact already played their patent card with some companies. Anyone thinking of deploying a large (1000+) installation using Samba instead of a Windows server will probably get a call/letter from a MS lawyer (once they get wind of it) stating that if you proceed you will be in violation of several Microsoft patents - even though they won't say what patents are involved!
Those of you who are not quite paying attention, just check out the interview with Stallman, Allison and Waugh at http://questionsplease.org/.
"try log a support call :)"
You missed my point I log support calls all the time with Oracle, and when they ask what platform I am on I tell them RHEL, even though 99% of the time the problem was discovered on CentOS (but is always replicatible on RHEL)
Postgres is a great product and we use it on a couple of our smaller projects, but when we have tested them side by side on our high volume applications, Postgres falls short, not too short but enough to justify using Oracle instead. I really wanted Postgres to work for us, because it is a dream to maintain compared to Oracle and it would have saved us major money.