Oracle to Compete With Red Hat for Linux Support 221
PCM2 writes "It's not Oracle Linux, but Larry Ellison has announced that Oracle will be providing full enterprise support for Linux. This means not just phone calls but also patches, security fixes, and backports, in addition to indemnification from lawsuits like SCO's. This puts Oracle in direct competition with its erstwhile partner, Red Hat, whose entire business is based on providing similar support for its Linux distro and related software."
About time! (Score:1, Interesting)
first step towards buying red hat? (Score:5, Interesting)
I understand.... (Score:5, Interesting)
But why not use established systems with guaranteed update mechanisms? Something like Debian with the stable branch comes to mind.
Extended warranty? (Score:5, Interesting)
TFA says RedHat doesn't sell the 'OS', but that's bullocks. You cannot legally get RHEL without paying for it (some of the copyrighted artwork and name), hence the whole point of the existence of projects like CentOS. Their fundamental business is built on support, but it changes not the fact that they do not give away the distro they sell anymore.
Yay. (Score:4, Interesting)
Oracle seems to support Oracle - like ocfs2, which so far as I can tell, is the only substantial Oracle contribution in mainline.
grep -r oracle.com
grep -r redhat.com
RedHat has invested in major contributors by putting them on staff. Oracle? Not so much.
So? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's about the value chain (Score:4, Interesting)
My guess is that Oracle isn't really targeting Red Hat, they're targeting IBM and eventually Microsoft. Larry E. isn't noted for humility and, if he takes out Red Hat, it's just a way station on the road to a greater goal.
Good news but for unexpected reasons. (Score:5, Interesting)
RedHat is stagnant. I have to admit a degree of ignorance here, but as far as I can tell, they are not really doing anything to excite interest in their market. They offer support and their own distribution (apart from Fedora Core) at outrageously high prices. (Even Windows server solutions are cheaper than RedHat.) Sure they gobbled up JBoss, but I do not think there is as much market overlap as one might suspect.
I might even go so far as to say RedHat has done a fair amount of damage to Linux adoption: they create high costs and little value or innovation likely because they face no direct competition.
With Oracle entering the picture, RedHat will be compelled to move quickly—to at least do something. I am not even quite sure what that is, but one way or another, this is adds choice for the market and that is always good, whether it results in a better RedHat or no RedHat.
It turns out my information was outdated. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have not checked the prices of comparable RedHat and Microsoft server offerings. It turns out that RedHat is still cheaper, but by a trivial amount. Compare the RedHat Store [redhat.com] (see: Server Operating System Products) and Windows Server 2003 R2 Pricing [microsoft.com]. (Wouldn't it be nice if Slashdot support post annotation or editing?)
At any rate, Windows might still be a superior server platform thanks to the effectiveness of ActiveDirectory, fine-grained ACL, and so on. I am no Windows apologist (on the contrary, quite the advocate of open source solutions), but I fear Microsoft may be leaping far ahead of their competition in this space.
Re:I'm confused... (Score:3, Interesting)
Dystopian future: because Unbreakable Linux is built off RHEL (like CentOS is), Red Hat lose (some/half/all) of their support customers to Unbreakable, can't afford to keep producing RHEL, and Oracle base future versions of Unbreakable on what, now?
Re:first step towards buying red hat? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So? (Score:4, Interesting)
anytime i reported an issue with our several thousand dollar implimentation, they either already had a patch that fixed it, or had one shortly thereafter.
so i guess everyone can mod both of these 'my individual experience' posts down, and call it even?
Re:I'm confused... (Score:5, Interesting)
A fundamental problem with open source (Score:3, Interesting)
Company A develops linux distribution, supports it.
Company B simply compies Company A's work, supports it as well.
My question is this, what is company A's incentive to develop a distribution? Because the development costs are 0 to company B and substantial to company A, company B can easily undercut the price of company A. It would seem like you'd have to be a fool to develop a distribution, since the GPL forces you to surrender your work to competitors who can easily undercut your price.
Re:Extended warranty? (Score:5, Interesting)
Really, this is Crazy Larry being pissed off that Red Hat bought JBoss. He's going to stick it to Red Hat the only way he can, run his own Linux support business, at a loss, in order to grab marketshare from Red Hat. Once Red Hat is anemic enough, or belly up, and his own customer base is large enough, he'll jack up the rate to something that's profitable. In Economic terms, this is known as "dumping". Flooding the market with low cost goods in order to gain market share. Then when all the competitors go out of business, you have a monopoly. And we all know what happens when someone has a monopoly...
-Runz
Re:I'm confused... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:first step towards buying red hat? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is Oracle we are talking about. Surely there will be strings attached. Let's see if EVERYONE gets the low price (if it's as low as they claim). Knowing Oracle as I do, I predict that the wonderful pricing will somehow apply to only those customers with Oracle support contracts for other Oracle products. I will be very surprised if they offer it as a straight-up substitute for RHEL, available in quantity 1, to everyone with a credit card.
Don't get me wrong, Oracle has some great products. But my purchase experience as an enterprise customer has been like walking into a car dealership. There was always some kind of nifty deal that I should be able to get, followed by lots of "reasons" why the wonderful discount was not available to ME.
Ex-Oracle OSS strategy guy's view (Score:4, Interesting)
An interesting point from Dave:
And this quote made me laugh:
Re:I'm confused... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I understand.... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm surprised that more people aren't posting the real reason why Oracle would be doing this. From being near DB upgrades, it seems relatively obvious to me. Oracle is not supporting their own version of Linux. All they're doing is extending the *existing* Red Hat support out a few years. Why? Because upgrading the OS on a database is a pain in the arse. To upgrade safely, you need to
1. Build two new DB systems, a primary and a backup. You can chintz by only doing one and upgrading the old hardware to the new OS, but there are a lot of issues: increased risk of failure; limiting yourself to the old hardware's capabilities; needing to upgrade hardware on a separate schedule from the OS.
2. Shut down operations.
3. Copy the data from the old systems to the new.
4. Turn on the new systems.
5. Turn operations back on.
6. Hope and pray that everything works.
DBs are expensive (think $100,000 in hardware). Upgrading a year before capacity forces you to do so can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
The planned outage can also cost thousands of dollars. If customers can't use your website, so they go to the competition...
The switchover doesn't always work. If not, you have an unplanned outage which lasts even longer. Further, the unplanned outage might extend outside your upgrade window. E.g. you have a planned outage from 1 AM to 4 AM Pacific time. Something goes wrong mid-upgrade. You waste an hour trying to make it work. Finally, you give up and roll back. More troubles, the roll back is not clean. Upshot is that you're still down at 10 AM and have missed over half the east coast work day. Both the length of the outage and the fact that it extends into daylight mean that you lose even more business.
Meanwhile, if you could have just waited another year, the systems that you are upgrading now would be unnecessary. Red Hat says that it isn't worth their time to sell support for RHEL3, and in most cases they are correct. However, for specific customers with high availability requirements, Oracle can make some money by extending the support lifetime of servers running their software. This further reinforces their position as one of the big two full service database supporters (IBM with DB2 is the other).
In an ideal world, most DB users would prefer to never upgrade the existing database. It's much safer to just replace it. Clean cutovers with no outage are far preferable. Planned and predictable are the keys. That's why DB users hate having to upgrade just because Red Hat has stopped patching security holes in that OS.
It's also worth noting that it's cheaper for Oracle to provide support than it would be for Red Hat. If Red Hat continued support, they'd find themselves supporting all sorts of additional pieces of sofware, e.g. Apache. Oracle's DB boxes are pretty single purpose. They run a minimal stack of software and Oracle just needs to support enough to run a DB on top.
Download Oracle Enterprise Linux OS (Score:2, Interesting)
From: http://edelivery.oracle.com/linux/ [oracle.com]
It seems a rebranded version of RHEL (a la CentOs). -- Ernest
Oracle offers SCOmnification .. (Score:3, Interesting)
"Red Hat has a separate indemnification [linux.com] policy. In Red Hat's case, this policy is called the Open Source Assurance program."
Presumably if Larry really believed the SCO case had any validity he wouldn't even consider using RHEL. And in relation to RHEL and the GPL what's stopping anyone buying a single copy of Oracle Linux and repackage it and selling it with support contracts. Presumably if Larry doesn't allow this then Oracle is in breach of the license.
"We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and (2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy [redhat.com], distribute and/or modify the software"
Re:Extended warranty? (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, this will be interesting to watch. More options in market, more alternatives to Microsoft combo - I love that. And free software proves what it is worth.