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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
The date line from the article on YaST
Friday, March 19 2004 10:32 AM
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
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?
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.
NIH syndrome, also known as Not Invented Here.
/a/b/c/d" is the same as "/a/b/c". And "cd /a/b/c/d; dirname `pwd`" is also not the same as "/a/b/c" in any system that uses autofs.
Oracle installers are notoriously bad, and seriously deform basic UNIX and Linux system configurataions. For example, "/a/b/c/d/.." is not the same as "/a/b/c". "dirname
These are basics, but Oracle is not capable of doing them, and never has been. The result is that their software is not easily installed or integrated into any standard system that does not aggressively avoid practices common to UNIX and Linux systems administrators.
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.
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.
"All the proprietary RH stuff" is just some trademarked logos and occurrences of the literal string "RedHat". That's about the only difference between RHEL and CentOS.
The Linux-Watch article you linked to doesn't make sense, either:
If they'd done even the slightest bit of research, they could have compared that to RedHat's claims of seven years of maintenance. If they wanted to do actual journalism, they would have pressed Oracle for specific examples of times RedHat has fallen through on that promise and (if they'd given any) seen what RedHat has to say in their defense. As far as I've seen, RedHat's support is as good as advertised.
It's a lot simpler than hat. They want to provide a complete solution. A lot of Oracle's potential customers aren't Windows users -- they're bigger than that, and currently run big IBM mainframes, Unix systems, etc (think banks, insurance comapnies, etc). Those are the guys that Oracle is after. If Oracle goes to a bank and says "we'll sell you the database and some of these tools, and then this other company will sell you these other pieces, and it'll all work out great", they'll be laughed out the door. Big, slow companies want ONE company to pull something together for them when it comes to their back-end systems (who do you think hires companies like IBM?). By providing their own copy of Linux, they can say "look, we'll provide and support your database, and your OS. Anything you need, we've got it". And that makes the CEOs sleep better at night. Does Oracle care about MS? Sure. But they're not looking to replace XP, or go after any desktop market at all. They care about the big guys with the big $.
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.