Oracle and Red Hat begin battle for the Enterprise

Salvance writes "Yahoo News (via ComputerWire) is reporting that Oracle and Red Hat are turning up the heat in the battle over Oracle's new enterprise Linux offering. While Oracle claims they'll be able to offer their 'Unbreakable' version of Red Hat's Linux offering for half the price, Red Hat asserts that all the important security and hardware certifications would be invalidated on Oracle's offering.

At this point, the only thing that's certain is that Red Hat needs to figure out how to keep their large Oracle Enterprise clients on board or risk becoming a takeover target (undoubtably, with Oracle leading the list of potentially bidders)."

That's great!

[Anonymous Coward]

And while they are busy pummeling each other Ubuntu will take the lead. As a former alienated Red Hat user I am glad Red Hat is getting some bad karma. Back in the day when Red Hat was free I would regardless go down to CompUSA and buy a copy to support them. Then they came out with this Fedora/Red Hat model where they aren't willing to eat their own dog food. I have installed Fedora numerous times only to be disappointed with the number of bugs in a very obvious unfinished product. I know the latest release of Ubuntu has had its issues, but I haven't gone to it as I have been very pleased with Ubuntu LTS. It is the stable version comparable to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but it is available to all and yes I support it via donations.

Re:That's great!

[montyzooooma]

"And while they are busy pummeling each other Ubuntu will take the lead."

In the enterprise server business? That doesn't seem all that likely...

Re:That's great!

[Henry V .009]

I've had two Ubuntu installs fubar'ed by bad automatic updates. It's fine for my desktop, but for a server (an RHEL replacement), I'd pick Debian stable any day. Actually I prefer Debian stable over RHEL. I just got through dealing when some major autofs bugs in RHEL 4 -- apparently been there forever -- bind mounts through a program map simply don't work without major hacks.

FreeBSD and PostgreSQL in the enterprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

We have started to use FreeBSD and PostgreSQL for our enterprise operations.

Basically, we have found that FreeBSD 6 scales better than Linux on the multiprocessor Opteron hardware we're currently using. Running Java EE 5 via FreeBSD's Linux binary emulation, we were able to consolidate onto one server several web applications that we previously had to run on several separate Linux systems. What's more, the average load of our new system is just under half that of the previous Linux installations, even though the hardware is exactly the same.

We've also started using PostgreSQL lately. We had been using a mix of various commercial SQL server softwares, but transitioned several of our DB servers over to PostgreSQL. We noticed immediate performance improvements. One particular system can now handle 300% more transactions per second than it could when using the previous, commercial database system.

We really don't care what Oracle and Red Hat do. Let them battle for our purchases all they want. We'll be sticking with FreeBSD and PostgreSQL, because they get the job done efficiently and effectively.

It's not about individual users

[melonman]

I don't think Red Hat's financial model relies much on people who used to buy a set of CDs for their home computer, and Oracle is even less interested in that market. The real money is in selling ES contracts to ISPs with hundreds or thousands of machines, or, especially, AS contracts with big companies.

As for RHEL/Fedora, I've been running RHEL on all my machines for the last couple of years, recently tried Fedora Core 5, and I'm no wondering why I wouldn't switch to that for most of my office machines (having one local machine running the same build as my leased webservers is IMO worth the money). I keep my downloaded Fedora CDs in one of my Red Hat 7.0 envelope for old time's sake...

And the reason it will take a lot to make me consider moving to Ubuntu or any other distro is simply that I can't bear the thought of going through the "where have they hidden this config file?" experience another time. If I'd gone with the trends as suggested by /. headlines, I would have moved from Red Hat to Mandrake to Gentoo to Ubuntu in the last four years, learned far more about the gnostic secrets of Linux than I ever want to learn, and been half as productive at my job (application programming) as a result. "Better the devil you know" counts for a lot for many OS users.

Oracle is dreaming

[t482]

If they think that their sales people will be worried about $1000 operating systems when they are selling $1 million dollar software packages (Big Iron Oracle @ 50K a CPU or Siebel).

Nothing will happen - and if you jumped into RH stock you could have made a quick 15% as it over reacted to the news.

1) Things will go on as normal - RH has more to fear from Ubuntu (teamed up with say IBM or HP)
2) Oracle will make noise and keep seeing their DB market share be destroyed by MS SQL server (which is cheap and good enough for many applications)
3) Oracle will go back to hocking APP servers - and making those buying the server buy Oracle DBs.
4) Redhat will have moderate success selling a beefed up Postgresql

Oracle might succeed if...

[vhogemann]

..they drop this "Enterprize Linux" idea, and instead focus on a Appliance approach.

As I pointed before (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=203218&cid=16 621458), Oracle did a very poor job cloning Fedora. And I really doubt that they have enought in-house knowledge to mantain a full fledged Linux distro.

Also, why on earth they want to offer a full distro anyways? It make a lot more sense to build a minimal distro, and wrap it around OracleDB! Every Oracle install out there already uses a dedicated machine, include a OS with the darned thing, and installation will be incredibly simplified. They should be teaming with RedHat, for support and R&D on this slimmed Linux!

Hell, even if they don't want to make business with RedHat, at least hire some CentOS developers to put together a decent distro!

It's all spin: Oracle has insignificant control

[postbigbang]

At best, Oracle can start to build their market. To believe the PR spin, you'd think they'd been kernel hackers from say, 1991. In fact, that's not true. While RHEL is competitive, remember that is free-open-source-software, and Oracle makes not a dime from that. Like RH, they'll add services, interesting apps, research, and perhaps a groupie audience with a Fedora-like effort, or that of OpenSUSE.

If you let Oracle achieve their 'marketshare' from thin air, you're doing injustice to hundreds of thousands of coders that have been evolving the kernel, GNU apps, and lots of interesting and useful apps-- that aren't poised strictly to sell a money maker- in this case the Oracle db.

Yes, Oracle has a powerful sales machine, even legendary. That Oracle now deigns fit to 'sanctify' Linux is more of a johnny-come-lately move while MySQL and PGRE eat their lunch. They also face enormous obstacles with IBM and its alliance with SUSE-- especially overseas. Don't let the marketing kiddies fool you.

Re:Oracle and RedHat have this in common...

[CastrTroy]

I think that Oracle is making a bad move here. Instead of partnering with Redhat, to provide a really stable and well working solution, they have chosen to just rape Redhat of all their hard work, brand it as their own, and cut Redhat out of the profits. I think that this may backfire on them. Many users of Redhat use it because it works well with Oracle. However, at this point, if nobody is using Redhat for Oracle, then Redhat may just stop being produced. If it doesn't go that far, we may see Oracle not working so well on Redhat, and the Oracle team, having to make tons of changes to Unbreakable Linux (haven't they got in trouble for making such claims before), just to get their Database to work. What is Oracles plan for providing updates? They can't just pass the updates on the second after Redhat releases them, as they will have to test them on their own distro. I don't think users will take the story that it's Redhat's fault when they release a patch that hoses their system. So, they have to test the updates for a week, then users will be waiting an extra week for the updates. I think it's a little underhanded to try to cut out the people making the operating system that made your product so strong in the first place.

They might be in different Market

[HighOrbit]

If Oracle is going after the general purpose linux server market, then RedHat has a problem. But I think most people would use Oracle Linux as a platform for Oracle DB, not as a general purpose box. In that case, Oracle will only be taking a small portion of RH's market. Usually, an Oracle installation is on a dedicated machine, so I don't expect to see Oracle Linux serving a lot of public webpages or used as a desktop. The only reason I can think of somebody using Oracle Linux for general purpose is if they have a specific policy of limiting the number of OSes to keep support cost down and they already sunk money into Oracle.

This really hurts Sun, because Solaris is the traditional Oracle platform of choice. Now Linux will be the platform of choice for Oracle. If Oracle makes clustering and failover really easy (as an added value over a simple RH respin), then Sun will take a real beating beause you would be able to replace that good-ol'-solid-and-reliable Sparc monster with a cluster of cheap pre-configured Oracle Linux boxes (instead of buying the next generation of Sun).

Re:Oracle is dreaming

[burnin1965]

1) Things will go on as normal

Couldn't have said it better myself.

When Novell purchased SuSE supposedly Red Hat was doomed because Novell was better positioned to bring linux to the enterprise. Red Hat continued to be the leading provider of linux to the enterprise.

When Sun open sourced Solaris Red Hat was doomed because Sun knows the enterprise and Solaris is a better linux than linux. Red Hat continued to be the leading provider of linux to the enterprise.

When Sun annouced that they would make Ubuntu linux enterprise ready then linux would finally be ready for the enterprise and Red Hat's end was near. And Red Hat continued to be the leading provider of linux to the enterprise.

Now Ellison's monsterous ego is lumbering through the market hunting down Red Hat to finally squash it because Oracle has ... lots of money. And guess what will happen, Red Hat will continue to be the leading provider of linux to the enterprise.

I think the key commonality in all these situations is that we have three closed source proprietary vendors who have been forced into accepting open source, sometimes kicking and screaming, as a significant part of the software stack their businesses rely on, but in the case of Red Hat they are an open source company.

Oh, and just as a side note for anyone reading this, that article started off with quite the ignorant flaimbait claims. Oracle cannot and will not be removing Red Hat copyrights from linux, they will be removing trademarks. Red Hat has licensed their copyrights on the code under the GPL and those copyrights will remain. And I'm not so sure about the author's claim that Red Hat said there would be hardware incompatibility, I think what they said is any changes to the code in the distribution would invalidate any certifications.

burnin