Oracle and Red Hat E-Commerce Partnership

Anonymous Coward writes "There's a press release out that says Red Hat and Oracle are teaming up to take on e-commerce. They have outlined bold initiatives to add support for IA64, a journaled filesystem and high avaliability. Even more they say it will include Motif, but they still say all additions will fit with the GPL." It's basically Oracle 8i teamed with an "optimized" version of Red Hat. Sounds nice. This joint product could have major impact on the e-commerce software marketplace if it works as promised. Claimed shipping date is mid-December.

Comments

Re:Why Motif?

[AJWM]

What does Motif provide that other window managers and complete enviroments (GNOME etc) don't provide?

Well, Motif is a GUI toolkit, not just a window manager (but includes mwm) or environment (but these days includes CDE).

As for what it provides that GTK or Qt don't: compatibility with the source code of zillions of apps (many for in-house use) originally developed on one of the proprietary unices, and compatibility with the expertise of the zillions of long-time Unix programmers who wrote those apps. And while Motif itself may not be open-source, Lesstif is, and is completely compatible with all the Motif programs I had lying around to try it with (none of which use the more obscure corners of Motif that Lesstif hasn't got to yet).

Back in the earlier GUI toolkit wars (OpenLook vs Motif) I favored OpenLook, but Motif won out and I've used it for years. If I'm developing an app even for Linux I'll use {Mo,Less}tif as first choice because it does the job and I can't be bothered (yet) to learn Qt or GTK.

There's also a hell of a lot more documentation (books, etc.) on the Motif API and Motif style guides, etc, (all applicable of course to Lesstif) than there is for either GTK or Qt.

Qt and GTK have their own advantages, of course, but the "installed base" of {Mo,Less}tif apps and expertise (and adjuncts like GUI builders) is too large for it to be casually dismissed.

And Motif is vital for any enterprise who wants to move their legacy Unix apps to Linux.

Re:But how...

[Communomancer]

"All changes to the Red Hat Linux OS will be delivered freely to the entire open source community under the GNU General Public License (GPL)"

This says nothing about additional software added to the system, such as Motif. I'd doubt that we'll see a free version of Motif anytime soon. Not that I'd especially want to, except maybe to run the dynamically-linked version of Netscape. Then again, Mozilla's doing just fine w/o Motif.

Personally, I'm more interested in the "Java Support" the article mentions. Kudos to the Blackdown and the Kaffe people, no doubt, but they can always use more help.

Re:But how...

[Pascal Q. Porcupine]

Well, there is a free version of Motif, namely Lesstif. It's apparently about on-par with Motif, except that it's apparently missing a few of the more obscure widgets and has no means of using pure Motif's particular binary flavor of compiled UIL (User Interface Language, a neat interface-design scripting language Motif has), though compiled UIL isn't really a major concern for free software projects anyway since, well, the UIL source would theoretically be available and compilable from there. :)

I'm with you regarding Java though. Servlets are godly for having clustered high-availability webservers with heterogenous systems. You can have a cluster of webservers where each is running a different CPU and OS and you only need what amounts to one compiled CGI binary for everything. (Say what you will, but I'd prefer to have a bytecompiled Java CGI than a runtime-interpreted PERL one. Yes, I know PERL can be bytecompiled too.) Oh, and it'll also be nice to be able to see all the glitzy web stuff which everyone seems to be using now without my system crawling and my browser crashing...
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Good!

[jonr]

I work in 99% oracle environment, and I'm very excited to see what this could bring us. Right now our choice of enterprise-class system for Oracle DBs are Sun Enterprise servers. Expensive, but real workhorses. If RedHat can make "optimized for Oracle" Linux system, I would have to give Linux x86 box a serious look as a cheaper alternative to the Sun boxes, without loosing too much performance.
Good news!
Jon

Re:Good!

[JordanH]

I saw a Comment on Slashdot awhile back that I thought was interesting. The poster said that Oracle was going to drop all versions of UNIX except Solaris and Linux next year, and then maybe Solaris after that.

I think Ellison has always chaffed at being pulled in different directions by the OS vendors. Witness the "Raw Iron" (is that what it was called?) initiative last year. Whatever happened to the idea of Oracle servers with "no OS"? I couldn't find any news that was newer than a year old when I looked a few months back.

The Unix vendors currently pay a lot to make sure that the latest Oracle is available on their platform in a timely fashion. As the Linux market grows, Oracle will be able to extract more and more from the Unix vendors to ensure support.

If this scenario plays out, then IBM decide to drop it and push DB2 and we might see some of the Unix vendors ban together in support of mSQL/mySQL/Postgres (and/or Sybase/Informix?) in a defensive move.

It would be interesting.

Re:Which JFS?

[Pascal Q. Porcupine]

For that matter, are there any places I could find some information comparing the various JFS projects for Linux? I know that there are a few (ext3, XFS, and a few others) but that's all I know about them - that they're being worked on. Even some information on theoretical comparisons regarding design philosophies would be really nice...

Hm, in that vein, I wonder if Be could be coerced into releasing BeFS as free. I mean, they've borrowed plenty of stuff from Linux (mostly shells, commandline utilities and LILO); one could argue that they owe the Linux community something in return, and from what I've seen, BeFS is very robust, stable, future-compatible (mmm, 64-bit addressing...), and very UNIXy and then some. It certainly has all the functionality that ext2 has, including the parts which nobody uses. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Re: Server, no. Client yes.

[Matts]

I downloaded it to access the client libraries to compile DBD::Oracle. I suspect most people download it for that reason. However having said that I am going to use the server on Linux for real development "real soon now".

Re:Linux no longer for the masses

[the eric conspiracy]

IBM did some sort of survey and came up with the conclusion that there were no more than 10,000 web sites that did actual e-commerce on a daily basis. Many of those may be linked into an outsourced service like Yahoo, web911 etc.

All this makes me really wonder what the real market for something like this is.

Of course there are many more applications for a database backed web site than ecommerce, but if you are talking about an expensive high end database like Oracle I think you need some revenue to justify the cost of Oracle.

I am working on a small web based business myself, and the business model I've come up with indicates that if I get 50 tranactions a day I'll be able to buy a beach front house on Diamond Head in three years. I can't imagine why I would want Oracle for this. It's much more effective for me to outsource the financial transactions.

Perhaps Lesstif?

[Christopher B. Brown]

The way there might be a GPLed Motif might be via improving Lesstif into providing Motif 2.1 functionality. That doesn't seem believable in the sort term, so I'm inclined instead to consider:

• Motif isn't part of the kernel, and thus doesn't "have" to be GPLed.

  That is not consistent with the the sorts of things RHAT has been releasing, though.

• Perhaps RHAT has been talking with the Open Group, and may have permission to release a GPLed release of Real Motif.

  Also a bit "out there" as theories go...

• Perhaps the press release is somehow wrong.

  Journalists never make mistakes, though, right?

There's really no compelling answer here...

Re:Which JFS?

[ericdano]

Um, I don't know if they would even want to deal with a JFS at the operating system level. In Oracle 8i, there is supposed to be a Internet File System, or iFS. Basically, allows you to use the Oracle Database to store your files, etc. You can read more about it here: http://www.oracle.com/database/options/ifs.html The possibilities with the iFS sound real promising. Oracle 8i's ability to convert sound and graphics on the fly using InterMedia are very impressive. Put that with iFS, and Linux, and watch out!

Veritas could be good for Linux

[Tet]

Why the comment from Veritas? I assume they're implying that Veritas will be used as part of the deal, although it wasn't explicitly mentioned. Whatever the pros and cons of Veritas (I haven't used it enough to say one way or the other), it will certainly help corporate acceptance of Linux. Veritas has strong brand recognition in the corporate arena.