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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."
you could always finance it ... there plenty of money that used to be available from the Subprime Mortgage industry
...but WTF does Oracle have to do with *Novell* releasing the source to YaST?
I've skim-RTFA (the one related to YaST), but nothing leapt out as being anything whatsoever to do with Oracle.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
From what I've been able to tell, OEL is just RHEL with Oracle support instead of RedHat support. Do people actually want this? Why didn't Oracle just work with RedHat/SUSE/etc. rather than fork? Money? Issues with RedHat Inc.?
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.
Oracles has always pride itself on it's cross-platform capability, but the only chips I see on the list are x86. Where is Power and Sparc?
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
There is one difference, though. Oracle is a Big Corporation; bigger than Google, for example; much bigger than Novell, and much much bigger than Red Hat. To see them offering a Linux product, and various FOSS projects (like their GPLed clustering file system and now Yast) is highly interesting; they are, to put it plainly, the biggest corporation selling a commercial Linux distro. In fact, I believe they are the 2nd-largest operating system vendor (perhaps there is a tie with Apple, though).
Of course, despite Oracle's size, their Linux business is tiny - the market is mostly Red Hat's, and to a lesser degree Novell's. But Oracle, if they take this market seriously, stand to become a significant player. And that isn't a bad thing, so long as they abide by the FOSS licenses they distribute and contribute back - which, it appears, they are in fact doing.
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.
Meh.... I don't care what Oracle does. They are a huge DB company trying to get in on the Linux game, just like M$. They are trying to undercut the big duo (Novell/Redhat) and it's not going to work... YAST is developed and controlled by Novell. RHEL is of course controlled and developed by Redhat.
They can offer there own disti solution, but it always is going to come down to the two major influences on purchasing decisions: Cost and Support. I am pretty sure that a SUSE or Redhat System with MySQL or better yet PostgreSQL is more cost effective and better supported than whatever Oracle is haucking these days.
Personally I like SUSE. I know that Novell has fallen from grace with the OSS community for the MS deal, but hey they whipped SCO's ass in court... gotta love them for that, and from a business standpoint the MS deal was very smart. People are going to switch to Linux... M$ can't stop that... it's too good of a deal for people. Novell is letting MS do the Marketing and Sales for them and letting M$ take a comission. Once SUSE is everywhere then Novell can kick them to the curb, and then "may the best disti win".
Kind of a reverse embrace, extend, extinguish. Only this time it's M$ they will get burned.
Actually, as someone that actually works at oracle, I can tell you that Oracle's pretty serious about it's Linux offering and open source, regardless as what you may think of them.
The official OS within Oracle is being transitioned to this Linux dist of them (Unbreakable Linux) and the official Windows base install in the company (for non dev people) is not even XP.
I work on Macs so none of these OSes concern me but we keep getting internal memos about Oracle's Linux.
I was intrigued to see EMC on the list of certified vendors because, although several of their products run Linux, I wasn't aware of any that fit the definition of general purpose computers. Could they be expanding their product line? Alas, it turns out that Oracle's Linux is only able to talk to EMC's gear, not run on it.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
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.
That is good to hear. I do like Oracle, but this oooooh Linux! I want a piece! Frenzy just kinda annoys me. bah If I had to build an enterprise DB I would probably use 10g on SLES.
I bet there Mac division is pretty awesome. I'm curious as to how 10g and Xserve play together...