It was another small step forward for Oracle Enterprise Linux this week as a handful of ISVs pledged support, but it’s still a long road ahead for the Red Hat clone. Says searchenterpriselinux, “The news came a day after Oracle announced that a handful of other hardware ISVs had also pledged to support its brand of Linux. For Tony Iams, a senior analyst with Rye Brooke, N.Y.-based Ideas International Ltd., the news was indicative of an upward trend for the company’s Linux distribution, which was launched in October.“
Oracle Linux Gets Backing From EMC, Others
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Adam Scheinberg
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We have all kinds of EMC storage at work running PVFS and MPFSI file systems.
So Oracle have managed to badger a company or two into supporting Oracle Linux – which is identical to Red Hat anyway? So what? Other than taking Red Hat’s SRPMs and compiling them themselves, I see no direction at all from Oracle as to where they’re taking this.
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
More businesses that support Linux, means less software totalitarianism.
That’s quite an ironic turn of phrase considering Linux is itself run by a Benevolent Dictator For Life.
Err, thats Mark Shuttleworth’s title, not Linus Torvalds.
Anyway, you are always free to fork Linux just like Oracle uses RH
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).
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
“That’s quite an ironic turn of phrase considering Linux is itself run by a Benevolent Dictator For Life.”
It is better to be benevolent than tyrannical.
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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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
Whatever works on Oracle will work on Red Hat as well. Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux is simply a ‘rebadged’ Red Hat linux, as stated before. So if they got some new ISVs to linux, that’s good news else it’s no big deal.
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.