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With friends like these.... (InfoWorld)

Here's an InfoWorld weblog entry reacting to Oracle's announcements. "Oracle, longtime partner to Red Hat, is rolling out the next phase of its Unbreakable Linux program, designed to kill Red Hat and Novell. With partners like Oracle, who needs competitors?" Included are a few of Larry Ellison's slides; it is interesting to see that he is using the SCO lawsuit as a reason to worry about the lack of indemnification from Linux vendors.
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Oracle should correct what they're saying about bug fixes...

Posted Oct 26, 2006 1:00 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

"Bug fixes are in future - not current or back - versions of software" -- Oracle. Wrong. All the pain and suffering of backporting fixes, RHAT should at least get credit for it.

Oracle should correct what they're saying about bug fixes...

Posted Oct 27, 2006 0:05 UTC (Fri) by pjhacnau (subscriber, #4223) [Link]

I had a thought about the "old days" when I was dealing more with Solaris, and you received "patch" files. And, if you look at the slides they refer to Oracle providing "patches and updates".

Are they defining any package update as "future" versions of software? And trying to extol patchfiles as superior? The mind boggles.

With friends like these.... (InfoWorld)

Posted Oct 26, 2006 1:37 UTC (Thu) by nselby (guest, #41320) [Link]

We posted two blog entries about this on our blog, The 451 Group's CAOS blog:

Here's Mark Shuttleworth talking to The 451 Group on the subject or Oracle-RHEL this evening, after the announcement:

"It's a very interesting move by Oracle, and sends exactly the 'services based' message I would expect them to want to send. On the one hand this is a hell of a shot across Red Hat's bows, on the other, it further entrenches Red Hat's position at the centre of the Linux-for-the-enterprise game.

"I think we can expect Oracle to get frustrated with supporting someone else's codebase. If it takes off from a business perspective, then fine, but I really doubt that large numbers of people will switch from Red Hat to Oracle as a provider of support for Red Hat."

Read more at The 451 Group's CAOS blog - also the posting from earlier in the day entitled, Shuttleworth: “No Oracle Deal…Today.” (but stay tuned)

Nick Selby
The 451 Group

With friends like these.... (InfoWorld)

Posted Oct 26, 2006 1:45 UTC (Thu) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link]

There are +ss and -'s to this:

-'s (the lies):
* The slides are wrong. It's been a while since I've used Red Hat, but one thing I'd always seen from them is that they *do* backport critical bugs.
* The slides are wrong. The SCO thing is FUD. You are not doing your potential Linux customers any favors by selling-- or rather giving away-- FUD.

+'s (competition):
* Red Hat/Novell could use some price competition. Red Hat should have different pricing models or lower prices altogether.
* Red Hat/Novell could use some competition in the support area. Though in my experience Red Hat's support has been pretty good. Linux support, in general, could only get better with more competition.

All-in-all, this would be a good thing for Linux if Oracle were willing to play (read compete) fairly. However based on their current propaganda, this unfortunately doesn't appear to be the case.

With friends like these.... (InfoWorld)

Posted Oct 26, 2006 2:38 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

If you don't want to pay for RHEL, go for CentOS. Same code base (mostly), no charge (and no guarantees either, obviously). OTOH, if what the machine is doing is in any way really critical to you, RHEL's maintenance fee is peanuts...

With friends like these.... (InfoWorld)

Posted Oct 26, 2006 3:59 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

In the past 10 years, I have yet to see Oracle:

a) play fair
b) help its partners
c) not end up taking out lots of other partner companies as collateral damage during some 'helpful' stunt.

I expect that they are looking to push Red Hat out of the business, but not expecting to pay for a large set of developers after they do so.

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