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Oracle Contributes Linux Code, Expands Hardware Support
Jaden writes "Oracle expanded the list of hardware compatible with its Linux distribution and added support for Novell's YAST administration tool. They have now certified six hardware configurations able to run Oracle Enterprise Linux. Certified products include those made by Compellent Technologies, Dell, Egenera, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Pillar Data Systems and Unisys. Oracle also said it is releasing an open-source version of the YAST Linux installation and configuration tool for Oracle Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux under the General Public License."
Windows is a chicken/egg problem. THey have the desktop share, so every client MUST be aimed at windows. Worse, every marketer will make their best one available on windows. And then companies have little money to port to Linux, let alone keep their top stuff on windows. And since it is MS's backyard, MS will persue any company that it wants.
By Oracle moving in a BIG way to Linux, they will hopefully be brighter than IBM and port ALL of their stuff to Linux. This really means all of their client work needs to go. Once more client software shows up on Linux and is equal or better then window's, then we will see lots of Linux desktop growth (and most likely apple and BSD as well).
Oracle is NO threat to redhat. Even if they just provided support, with no contributions, a number of ppl who are not on Oracle would stay with redhat. Why? Because THEY are the market leader. In addition, they have one of the best reputations in the industry. Oracle, while having a support reputation well above MS's, still has a so-so rep. In particular, they are known as being expensive. Redhat is fairly reasonably priced and the support is superior.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If you ask Oracle - they didn't fork it. They are just offering support and patches to RHEL - and pulling out all the proprietary RH stuff so that they can put it out there themselves, at least that is how I understand it.
Here is a Linux-Watch article about it.
From what I've seen Oracle wants all the certs, and other things RHEL has earned, but to be able to sell their own support and have more control of patching for their stuff. The skeptical part of me wonders if this is also a very early attempt to make sure Red Hat's work to build any kind of database product around PostgreSQL never takes off. I'm just a dba who reads slashdot too much - so I don't know all the how or why, but I'm definitely interested in stuff like this to keep track of where it is all headed.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I run Debian for a variety of applications at home and at work, from desktop to to workstation to server. Among those systems, I have OpenOffice, which is mostly Sun Microsystems's baby, KDE, to which IBM is a significant contributor and sponsor, the QT toolkit that KDE is built on comes from Trolltech, Google and HP sponsor Apache, etc. Linux itself gets significant patches from Sun, RedHat, IBM and Novell, among many, many others. When Ubuntu came around, I saw a huge number or genuine improvements work their way into Debian desktops, and I am grateful for it.
So you see, actually, yes, the Linux ecosystem is very intertwined. I really do hope that Oracle starts developing for their distro and releasing it GPL. I see nothing in the articles here that suggests that this is the case (as opposed to the summary), but I think that any sign that a company will start contributing is relevant.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Oracle wants to sell systems more than anything; they like it when their benchmarks can be tuned to the hardware, they like to live on raw partitions, they do their own scheduling and execution within the DB engine, the only thing that failed that they've tried over the years, is an Oracle OS for running 'other' things on (i.e. your apps). With Linux, they have a marketable (the PHB has heard of it), reliable OS that also runs java (their other fetish), which is why they take Linux very seriously indeed.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.