Oracle considers venturing into Linux (FT)

Posted Apr 17, 2006 14:10 UTC (Mon) by richo123 (guest, #24309) [Link]

Larry Ellison with a linux distro? Ho Ho Ho! S and M linux? Control Freak Linux?

Posted Apr 17, 2006 14:56 UTC (Mon) by wtogami (subscriber, #32325) [Link]

http://www.miraclelinux.com/
Oracle already owns part of this distro for the Japanese market.

Posted Apr 17, 2006 17:25 UTC (Mon) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

Like all things Oracle does, this is predicated on the "fight" with Microsoft, which itself has become categorically irrelevant. Oracle needs to focus on salesforce.com, mysql, jboss, and the rest of the integrated portable stacks that will eventually render Oracle irrelevant.

Posted Apr 17, 2006 17:56 UTC (Mon) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872) [Link]

Didn't everyone say they should do exactly this when Oracle first announced Linux versions of their server products?

This is a great illustration of why the separation of software development and "productization" in open source builds a resilient marketplace. Instead of RHEL, if Oracle had partnered with SCO to make OpenServer the best OS for their database software (ha ha) and then SCO then came out with their own competitive RDMS and application platform, it would be time to choose a new OS. With open source, you can always take your support requirements to another company or even internally if it becomes necessary.

Posted Apr 17, 2006 20:17 UTC (Mon) by jonabbey (subscriber, #2736) [Link]

This seems like a disastrously bad idea. If Oracle picked up their own Linux distro and tried to run with it as a profit center, they'd find themselves incentivized to discriminate against other distributions, and makers of other distributions would find themselves incentivized to push other databases.

If Oracle were to buy Novell and Red Hat both and then come out with the single unified distribution solution, they might avoid much of the downside here, but then everyone using a common Linux distribution would be depending on Larry Ellison's good graces.

Yuck.

Posted Apr 18, 2006 3:00 UTC (Tue) by skitching (subscriber, #36856) [Link]

Remember that Oracle serves two markets:
* "small" sales of a licence or two, where the purchased product typically shares a system with other software, and
* "large" sales of major systems where hardware is dedicated to running the product in question (whether it be database, ERP suite or other).

For Oracle, having their own linux distro that they can bundle with "large" sales of their product seems an excellent idea to me. Currently, when someone spends $50 million on Oracle licenses, Oracle still needs to recommend someone else's operating system to run the stuff on. Once installed, patches for that operating system need to be taken from the OS vendor. I'm sure all this makes life very difficult for Oracle. Example: MS-Windows is selected, and Microsoft release a security patch. Or RedHat is selected, and RH release a security patch. System administrator applies patch, and breaks the Oracle product. Hmm..who's responsible for sorting this out now?

If Oracle have their own linux version, then they can perform their own testing, include just the features that their products need, tune to match the needs of their products, and perform comprehensive testing before releasing any patches. And any of their staff who need to help fix stuff on such a system will only need to deal with one OS type.

This is of course different from "small" sales, where someone buys one license of an Oracle database server, and runs it on an existing system. They will still need to provide Oracle for these platforms as small sales often become big ones later. However maintenance of the system is then more on the shoulders of the purchaser. If a patch to the OS breaks Oracle, Oracle can justifiably say it's your own fault.

And if Oracle are going to develop and support their own Linux distribution, then it makes some sense to reuse those inhouse skills to actually offer it to the public as a general-purpose OS. I do agree with a prior poster that this risks a conflict of interest vs other linux distros though.

The article clearly talks about "a complete software stack" which seems to me to imply having the ability to bundle an OS with their products is the priority. Buying someone like Novell might be one way to achieve that. However going for Mandriva might make more sense; still an excellent core developer group but less expensive to buy. Or they could just hire the right people and start their own distro.