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This way Oracle can provide support for the OS as well as the DB server. Dealing with a large government organization that is totally in bed with Oracle and IBM, I can understand the logic. I'm sure Oracle will get support contracts out of this, even if it is just a RH-recompile. Who knows, they might diverge in the future. Oracle just wants the support contracts, judging on how they conduct business in general.
I see nothing wrong with it, free market economy and OSS at work here. I also (personally) wouldn't touch a RH or Oracle supported product with a ten foot pole, but if I had to pick one - I'd pick Oracle. I dealt with RH support a long time ago - and was not impressed. While Oracle's software is crufty and a PITA to work with, the few times I've called for support - I've talked with somebody who knew a heck of a lot.
I've had just the opposite experience. I have had great experience with RH tech support. They have been very willing to help us out when we need it. Oracle on the other hand has expected us to bend over backwards when we call in a bug report. Like asking us to send them a copy of our data set. That may seem reasonable, except its about 800 Gigs worth. And they didnt seem interested in fixing certain bugs. I also don't like Oracles take on patching. Which is not to do it unless something breaks. Then bend over while they make it extremely difficult to do. We are an educational institution though so that may have something to do with it.
Hence the reason I doubt Oracle's stay with its own distribution for the long term; this isn't Oracles first foray into the operating systems market.
I put the rest of the reply on my blog to save space: http://kaiwai.blogspot.com
Err, thats Mark Shuttleworth's title, not Linus Torvalds.
Actually that is the title of many OSS project starters. Larry Wall and Guido van Rossum are others. If anything Shuttleworths is the most dubious because he has not created anything new like Perl, Python or Linux (kernel).
Anyway, you are always free to fork Linux just like Oracle uses RH
I thought Mark Shuttleworth was Self Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life ?
Anyway I just wanted to point out the irony. Benevolent dictators fighting for freedom against software totalitarianism. Personally I prefer the more democratic approach ( http://www.freebsd.org/administration.html#t-core ), even the most enlightened of despots sets a bad precedent.
Edited 2007-04-27 11:26 UTC
Oracle is a big company that can stand up against Microsoft. It's always nice to have a big companies backing Linux.
I'm sure Red Hat will reduce their support prices if they began losing buisness contracts.
As long as it doesnt effect Fedora, its all good competition in my opinion.
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I'm sure Red Hat will reduce their support prices if they began losing buisness contracts.
As long as it doesnt effect Fedora, its all good competition in my opinion.
Oracle has always supportde linux as far as I can recall. In fact it's *nix support as a whole is far far greater than the Windows support.
[edit - messed up the quote]
Edited 2007-04-27 09:45
I was coming back from the mountains a few days ago and hitched a ride on a auto rickshaw with a newly wed couple. The couple happened to work in Bangalore, the groom works for Oracle in the sales department. Naturally we got into geek talk. He told me that Oracles got no money left in the bank, that all their acquisitions have gotta start turning profits or else Oracles f--ked. So he says. I asked him about the new Oracle distro and he said its actually very good, much better than RH Enterprise. Genuinely better - not just saying that because he works for'em. To install, setup, tune, etc... Oracle on RH would take a couple of days, where as it would only take a couple of hours to get up and running on their own distro. Uhh thats all I got.



