Hey Oracle, Why Not Ubuntu?

OSS_ilation writes "While much has been said about Novell or Red Hat as potential targets for Oracle this week, there are some in the Linux community who believe a different distro might deserve the attention of Larry Ellison. That distribution is Ubuntu, and analysts like Burton Group's Richard Monson-Haefel believed that it would be a better fit for Oracle, which is looking only for an OS and not for any of the baggage associated with Novell, like Netware. Ubuntu, with its huge community base and version 6.06 on the way, could be the perfect fit, he said."

Oh, god, please no

[gclef]

Oracle's security record is abyssmal, their products have major usability issues (yes, including their database...god that thing's arcane), and the company itself is arrogant as hell. Please, don't let that beast absorb a sensible distro.

I don't think the people understand

[saleenS281]

Anyone in the ubuntu community doesn't quite understand what will happen if oracle were to buy out Ubuntu. Ubuntu in my experience is targeted at making it easy for n00bs to use linux. Oracle will definitely NOT be focusing on this area. They'll be focusing on tweaking whatever OS they do use to make oracle easier to use and setup. They don't care about the latest video codec, your new soundcard, or that great new 3D rendered desktop.

The goals of oracle and ubuntu are so far off from each other it troubles me to hear anyone even make the suggestion.

"Baggage" no only negative things...

[luvirini]

Novell does have some other things in itself besides Linux.

One of the things is a fairly large userbase for Netware.. and a working structure of a company.

So, yes if you are looking for just a linux distro, they are not the thing to aquire, but if you are looking to expand you market share in general.. (like Oracle tries to) Novell does have (atleast potentially) other benefits too.

Only one problem

[Philodoxx]

Mark Shuttleworth has no incentive to sell Canonical/Ubuntu to Oracle. If he were in it for the money, Ubuntu wouldn't mail me CDs once every six months.

Ummm....

[Otter]

"Oracle just wants to add the OS, so Ubuntu Linux would make a lot more sense than Novell," said Richard Monson-Haefel, a senior analyst with Burton Group.

Far be it from me to question the wisdom of Richard Monson-Haefel, but I assume people at Oracle are capable of grasping the difference between adding a Linux distribution and buying a company the size of Novell.

Ubuntu user base is not the best for Oracle

[stm2]

Oracle plays in a different niche than Ubuntu. Oracle should buy RH or Novell if they want to reach enterprise users.

Channels

[WindBourne]

Oracle is not looking to buy a linux. They are looking to buy a channel. If they were looking for a distro, they would simply roll their own. Getting into businesses is the hard part esp. with companies such as MS blocking their way (illegally, but overlooked these days) and IBM (not illegal, but DB is a real database).

Ubuntu forum community smaller than Gentoo's?

[Dan Ost]

Ubuntu also boasts one of the largest community bases of all the Linux distributions, called the Ubuntu Forums, which contain more than 67,000 unique registered users.

Hmm...the Gentoo forums have over 111,000 unique registered users.

As if unique forum name count was a meaningful metric of anything.

Re:Oh, god, please no

[moro_666]

in some ways i agree, there's no point of giving oracle the most quickly evolving distro. larry would mess it up.

but in some other ways, let's face it, ubuntu is already quite bloated so the damage couldn't be very large :p

all-in-all, if oracle wanted to buy a distro for it's servers, i'd rather have seen them forking their own gentoo fork with prebuilt packages or taking over arch-linux. oracle knows that the market is tight, they want to roll out bigtime with this, so it's either a choice of good performance (gentoo/arch/you-name-your-good-optimized-distro-h ere) or a massive package of bloatware mixed with oracle style stuff that never quite does what you'd expect it to.

suse will do for the stuff that they chose. maybe they already felt that ubuntu could be a bit too big fish to catch, besides i don't think it was 'on sale'. whereas outside germany suse was heading down (at least in the linux communities that i move around, nobody really suses anymore), and it was therefor easier to pick up. and also, getting the novell along with it is like buying a meal and getting a free sauce with it, why the hell not ?

i remember installing oracle 8i database on linux ... that was a living hell in the first attempts.

i'm running ubuntu right now on my laptop here, and i'd doubt seriously if i'd still use it if this poor thing would be overloaded with oracle mess.

oh who cares anyway, i will switch to freebsd 6.1 as soon as it comes out ...

Fork!

[moochfish]

Yeah. If Oracle tried to take Ubuntu, the very next day you'd see news about a fork. The goals of Oracle are simply too different from the developers of Ubuntu for any simbiotic relationship to develop. Oracle wants a stable, no frills server for a massively scaleable database. Ubunto aims for the desktop crowd.

zealot attitudes destroy trust

[daniel_ortmann]

Why not Ubuntu? Zealot attitudes destroy trust.
Earlier today someone flamed a Linux release for the self-
righteous feeling it gave him. Such a person must NEVER
be given any real responsibility.

(By the way, I *do* use Ubuntu and I do *not* use Oracle.)

Cause it's not about the distro!

[truthsearch]

It's not about the distro. If it were they'd take a small team and customize their own disto. Novell offers services and software (much more than just an OS) to a wide range of governments and mid-sized companies. Oracle has owned the really big business market for a long time. They have a much harder time getting mid-sized and smaller customers. That's where Novell fits in today.

A Novell purchase would be about much more than a distro. It's a corporation with long-term contracts and consultants. Which distro they choose is almost insignificant in comparison.

Ubuntu, or possibly Mandriva?

[dcavanaugh]

Full disclosure: I own a small number of NOVL and RHAT shares.

Compared to Novell, I think it would be more practical for Oracle to acquire Ubuntu or Mandriva. If I owned ORCL I would rather see them get into Linux by purchasing a Linux-only company.

NOVL has alot of legacy stuff that is of no value to ORCL (although it throws off enough revenue to give them some breathing room while they figure out how to operate as an open source company). RHAT has been relatively successful in monetizing Linux, but the share price includes alot of future expectations. I own both of these and would benefit nicely if ORCL buys either one. But I doubt they will.

Canonical Ltd. looks like they are privately held and might be a relatively easy buy. On the other hand, they seem quite serious about keeping Ubuntu "free as in beer". Mandriva is more of a conventional company. They are publicly traded, and they sell nothing other than Linux and related services. Although they try to avoid giving away the product, Mandriva never crossed the dreaded "Caldera line". As a result, they have a viable product (a Red Hat derivative that could use some work) and their name is unblemished.

Re:Ubuntu & Oracle -- two different universes

[Orlando]

Why is the parent modded as funny? This is entirely the point. Oracle are not in the least bit interested in making things easy because making things difficult is where they earn their money. Their software is a nightmare to install and manage where other databases that are capable of 100% of what 95% of people need from a database are a breeze (PostgreSQL). If I were an Ubuntu developer the LAST thing I would want would be Oracle getting their grubby fingers all over it and making a big mess out of it.

Re:Ubuntu & Oracle -- two different universes

[IdleTime]

If you are too stupid to follow a simple installation instruction that tells you exactly what all the kernel parameterrs need to be, I wouldn't put the blame on anyone but yourself.

And if you try to install Oracle on an unsupported distribution, you can not expect it to work flawlessly. I install databases on a regular basis and I have never had the installer crash on me since version 8.0.4, i.e approx 7-8 years ago. Does it crash? Sure, most of the issues we have with the installer is due to people not reading the instructions, trying to install on a configuration not meeting the minimu requirements, using an incorrect version of JRE, thinking that they know better than everyone how things are done and ignore instructions.

I've said it before and I'll be happy to repeat it. Oracle RDBMS is currently the most complex piece of software sold publically and it requires knowledge about the product to manage it.

Stop blaming Oracle and blame yourself for being an ignorant who can't follow instruction like this one [oracle.com]

Why not Oracle?

[digitaldc]

Just hire some people and make your own software? Is this too hard?

Re:Ubuntu & Oracle -- two different universes

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I've said it before and I'll be happy to repeat it. Oracle RDBMS is currently the most complex piece of software sold publically and it requires knowledge about the product to manage it.

Ask yourself. Why?

People scoff at Access, yet, when you come right down to it, what separates the logic of creating a database in Access verse creating one in Oracle. It's all just rows and columns, with some primary keys, indexes and hey presto, there's your database.

Please explain why exactly Oracle needs a DBA, yet an Access database can be created by an accountancy intern? Yes the Access database will be dog slow and unoptimised, but where's the software that optimises on the fly? Where's the software to make setting up an oracle database as painless as seting up one in Access?

Answer. It doesn't exist. It will never exist. The "power" of Oracle lies entirely in the hands of the DBA who regularly grooms it. Oracle can and will grind to a halt without constant lubrication and maintainance.

Oracle is complex because without being so, it could not be hand tuned to be efficient. If MySQL allowed the kind of low level control and optmiisation Oracle has the two would probably be able to go toe to toe quite easily.

It's the Debian, Stupid

[bill_mcgonigle]

Ubuntu is based on Debian. SuSE is based on, well, SuSE.

Oracle can't own Debian. It think that pretty much covers it.

Re:And how would this help Oracle?

[SwashbucklingCowboy]

Otherwise they would simply role their own.

Putting together a distro isn't that hard. Supporting it the way Novell and Red Hat do is hard. That's what Oracle would need to do.

A meta-question concerning the parent post

[Qbertino]

The semi-funny parent post goes along on the trouble of installing Oracle as compared to MySQL and/or Postgres. My experience is that any DB Server requires solid knowledge of it's workings in order to do a clean install. Postgres from scratch is just as painfull as any other. And just because you can apt-get install mysql doesn't mean it's usually easy to install.

My question: Isn't it the big problem with various DB engines that they are more or less very simular but all still have the anoyances we all associate with DBs since 25 years ago? (I'm asking the experts here, folks, not some wannabees) Are there any truly essential differences between, let's say, MySQL 5 and the current Oracle release?

They both use some SQL variant, they both are a fuss to get up and running and they both provide some kind of sort-of-usable bridge between the real world and true object-relational dreamland. Isn't that so? Correct me if I'm wrong. And before you go on about service and all that, detail on what Oracle has to offer that MySQL AB can't provide for equal or less costs. Thanks for any usefull reply.

Stupid ass question

[tacocat]

Why Unbuntu?

Because they can't be recognized as an Enterprise Capable product with a company to back them up with resources, SLA's, and contractual gaurantees. That's why.

This is kind of a dumb question. Sure, Oracle could run on Debian or anything else, but none of these products are making any significant inroads into the corporate american businesses who would purchase Oracle in the first place. It would make as much sense as buying out Amiga.

Ubuntu and Oracle - strange bedfellows?

[russbutton]

Ubuntu - "Humanity to others"

Larry Ellison's Oracle - "In-humanity to others"

Re:Oh, god, please no

[Bretai]

Distributed on one CD. That does not qualify as bloated in my book.