“So how is Oracle doing with its Oracle Unbreakable Linux? Pretty well. According to Monica Kumar, senior director Linux and open source product marketing at Oracle, there are now 2000 customers for Oracle’s Linux. Those customers will now be getting a bonus from Oracle: free clustering software.”
a really nice distribution and all, but I just can’t find any reason to be excited about, or even remotely interested in, a product created from the blood, sweet and tears of others who’s sol purpose is to leverage an overpriced proprietary db, while creaming off of those other people.
The bloody thing is based on RHEL! The least Oracle could do is partner with RedHat instead of re branding RedHat’s distro and flogging it as their own!
Just my €0.02
They were, or maybe still are, Red Hat partner.
I think that their Linux users are the ones who run their
database server. They just need a platform to run it, but database server remains the major product. Since the Linux is under convenient license they just incorporated it in their product line. The advantage is that they can offer a single point of support for the whole stack. Oracle claims that they have lowered the overall cost and price.
I don’t think that Oracle did anything wrong. Linux is meant for such things, and licenses encourage users to do that. As someone said, Linux isn’t proprietary.
Why would they create heir own distro, if Red Hat is good enough for them ? It would be a wasted effort, and, in the end, they would use the code written by other people, just like Red Hat itself.
THe both sides gained because they made initial effort to make database server and RHEL work together smoothly.
If Red Hat don’t like it, they can develop some proprietary administration tool and make it part of their distro, exclusively. Or they can take advantage of the situation, and arrange with Oracle to include some of their tools that are available without charge, like JDeveloper.
I think that the whole thing is blown out of proportions by IT journalists. It is not the first, and unfortunately not the last time. IT journalism is still one of the worst aspects of IT.
The thing is, it’s “purpose-built”. It’s for customers that are going to be running Oracle software, and want a single point-of-contact for support. People aren’t buying it from Oracle for running general purpose apps.
It’s a common thing, actually, though Oracle is probably the highest-profile company doing so. Any network appliance with turn-key software is likely running a derivative of RHEL. Less high-profile companies, like Check Point Software, who own the enterprise firewall market, roll their own version of RHEL as a no-cost deployment option for customers, to bypass the price of an official RHEL or Windows license.
RHEL is the choice platform for general purpose application deployment, and you pay a premium to RH for support of that platform. Certainly RH isn’t suffering a shortage of customers.
But the nature of their model also encourages the behavior of Oracle et al. If you’re going to deploy linux for one specific application, should RH have some sort of linux-monopoly on this market any more than Windows should be entitled to a pay-us-or-else atitude? The customer has the choice of placing their trust in the vendor using a derivative platform, or opting to pay a premium in choosing RH directly. There’s nothing wrong with that, and RH has taken no measures to try and prevent this type of activity.
They don’t need to, because they have a large enough market of customers that value the support they provide. And by the same token, when companies like Oracle can simply branch RHEL under their own label, it forces RH to ensure they are providing customer value in order to compete. I actually think that’s a good thing, and it’s the type of thing that ultimately keeps vendors focused on servicing customers.
Robbed of lock-in, a company has no choice but to innovate and service their customers, or face extinction. I don’t see it as a bad thing, and I don’t think RH has suffered because of it. We just need to re-adjust our perspective for OSS-based business models versus proprietary, because there really is no concept of “theft” in OSS (assuming you abide by the license). It forces companies to invest in providing the best level of support, and I think that is one of the chief benefits of commercial OSS.
Just my 2c…
Great. They are now offering clustering courtesy of our friends at Red Hat. Gee thanks Oracle. What a bunch of losers.
i dont think your friends at redhat invented oracle clusterware or rac
yeah, this isn’t the redhat cluster suite, it’s the oracle clusterware.
The installment base is disappointing I guess.
We mainly see RedHat and upcoming SLES, in favor of RH.
Why are they losers? They’re doing exactly what open source was intended to do: leverage other peoples’ work.
I think they should integrate the database install, and os, and make them one, and of the same. Like pfsense, or m0n0wall does with the firewall. The os would be completely minimalistic to just run the database software as optimized as possible. I think that would be killer.