Red Hat Releases Enterprise Linux 5

An anonymous reader writes "Red Hat has a new release out for Enterprise Linux, reports Ars Technica. Along with several anticipated new features, Enterprise Linux 5 marks the rollout of the RedHat Exchange (RHX), which will be a source for commercial third-party software applications. 'RHX will allow consumers to buy software support services for third-party open-source technologies like MySQL database software and SugarCRM customer management systems directly from Red Hat ... Linux vendor Novell, which recently partnered with Microsoft to provide stronger Windows interoperability, is already carving out a growing portion of the enterprise Linux market. Red Hat also has to contend with proprietary database vendor Oracle, who now offers commercial Linux support for Red Hat users.'"

Comments

No waves in the pool.

[TihSon]

Whatever the technology crowd might think of Red Hat's new toys, the markets sure don't seem to care. Their last five days show a large amount of "who cares" on Wall St.

Between the big 'O' and it's 'unbreakable' RH distro, and the advent of Nicrosoft, I think a lot of people are doing a lot of watching and waiting.

Re:No waves in the pool.

[lawaetf1]

Because the market is such a reliable judge of what makes a good technology. Every time the market beats up on RHT (which it loves to do) I buy and I've yet to go wrong with that strategy (granted I will only use this approach so long as I retain faith in the company). Consider the pummeling it got when Oracle announced Unbreakable. Anyone with a clue laughed at Oracle's move but the market reacted by pounding the stock.

So Novell has allied themselves with Microsoft which is questionable at best. From all what I've read the whole bit about cross indemnification was a last-minute "oh yeah, we'll also need you to sign this" from Microsoft. To which they replied, "yes, boss" while staring hungrily at the $240 million check.

Face it, Redhat *is* enterprise linux in the US. It got #2 in CIO magazine in terms of customer satisfaction and that's saying a whole hell of a lot (Novell came in at 23). As far as the Oracle Linux bit, I can't find the article but there was a recent piece about how nobody is adopting the rip-off OS. Even the enterprise clients that Oracle listed replied when contacted that they were either NOT using it or were doing a small pilot project. And who knows how many free licenses of 10g oracle had to give out to get even that much traction.

So much to say

[XB-70]

This release will be an interesting test of ORACLE's knock-off capabilities - let's see how long they take to do it. CentOS will be challenged to get it out there too. I wonder which will be first.

Red Hat should not be slagged for it's efforts. This is a major accomplishment. The virtualization aspect to this release is the wave of the future. Fundamentally, we are seeing the evolution of the server platform to a new level with radically improved capabilities. I'm very disappointed that so many of you are not giving credit where credit is due.

We are starting to see a wave of movement towards Linux in general. CIO's, towns, villages, states, provinces and governments are starting to appreciate the benefits of this tremendous software. Let's aid and abet their efforts and not demean what Red Hat has achieved.

Full disclosure: I run CentOS 4.x - uptime almost 2yrs!! I have installed and managed RH 7.x and 8.x w/ ORACLE. My laptop is a cheezy Thinkpad T30 with SuSE 10.2 and I no longer use MS except to manage my CrackBerry account online.