Oracle's Red Hat rip-off (Linux-Watch) [LWN.net]

Linux-Watch considers the effects of Oracle's Unbreakable Linux distribution on Red Hat. "Oracle, however, can afford to undercut Red Hat's support prices, which puts the Linux giant in a very precarious position. The lion's share of Red Hat's business is far from just the enterprise database customers that make Oracle its billions, but the enterprise has increasingly been an important part of Red Hat's income. In short, this move hurts Red Hat a lot. In fact, I think Red Hat would have been better off if Oracle had started its own Linux, or bought Ubuntu or some other company. In either case, Oracle would have had to fight to win Linux market share even from its own customers. With this move, Oracle simply rips off Red Hat's mind-share, while promising a cheaper price."

(Log in to post comments)

Oracle's Red Hat rip-off (Linux-Watch)

Posted Oct 26, 2006 18:32 UTC (Thu) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]

This article is obviously an emotional response, probably written in haste.

Oracle is abiding by the terms of the licenses, at least as far as we know at this point. I agree that it does look somewhat grim for Red Hat, at least short term. On the other hand, I don't have much confidence that Oracle can provide support for Linux as well as Red Hat does. Red Hat has been doing this for a long time, and they're good at it.

Oracle's Red Hat rip-off (Linux-Watch)

Posted Oct 26, 2006 19:04 UTC (Thu) by ronaldcole (guest, #1462) [Link]

It isn't going to hurt Red Hat any worse than CentOS or White Box does. I truly doubt that Oracle is going to update SpamAssassin in RHEL3, for example. It wouldn't be in their financial interest to fork RHEL, so I have to believe that they'll simply track RHEL... just like CentOS and White Box. The only value I see Oracle adding is their assurance that their database and their "re-branded" RHEL play nicely together.

Oracle's Red Hat rip-off (Linux-Watch)

Posted Oct 26, 2006 19:22 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Well, actually, in the Unix world Oracle is a big beast business-wise.
Every non-IT-core business I know outside the networking world that has
chosen Linux has chosen it for one reason and one reason only: because
Oracle recommends it and it runs on fairly cheap hardware (the latter not
so important given the immense cost of Oracle licenses). And I'd be
willing to wager that these are the guys who bring much of the money in to
RHEL.

So if these guys migrate en masse to what Oracle's now recommending (i.e.
their own distro), it'll harm RH, oh yes.

--- of course it'll keep going: Cygnus ran for years with far fewer
customers than RH is ever likely to fall to. But it might be hard for a
while.

Oracle's Red Hat rip-off (Linux-Watch)

Posted Oct 27, 2006 0:27 UTC (Fri) by phgrenet (subscriber, #5979) [Link]

I'm not so sure about this. I can tell you that big Linux and UNIX shops like the company I work for want to standardize everything on one distro, because it makes everything easier and cheaper. The price of the distro itself is a small parameter in the overall cost equation. I don't see RHEL being displaced in medium or big companies even on database machines.

Oracle's Red Hat rip-off (Linux-Watch)

Posted Oct 27, 2006 21:36 UTC (Fri) by ronaldcole (guest, #1462) [Link]

If they don't fork, but just track, then hurting Red Hat isn't in their best interest either. That is, unless they're ulterior motive is to eventually steal RHEL right out from under Red Hat. If Red Hat goes belly-up, Oracle is probably in a position to hire all the newly "liberated" developers. If that happened, what would become of Fedora? Of course, that's an awful lot of "if"s!

Oracle's Red Hat rip-off (Linux-Watch)

Posted Oct 26, 2006 18:50 UTC (Thu) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link]

This is admittedly a mild troll, but the question bears asking:

How is this any different, ethically, from a consultant selling support for CentOS? The software is freely available. Red Hat doesn't own it (or rather: they don't own most of it, and the parts on which they do hold copyright they explicitly release under the same terms).

If the answer comes out sounding like "little players get to do it, but not big companies" then I think we might need to reevaluate what we expect from companies providing "commercial" linux. Certainly Red Hat is no "small player" either.

Good question

Posted Oct 27, 2006 18:10 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

I think that the easiest answer lies in forgetting the origin of the code. The way of being a good citizen in a Free Software ecosystem starts with contributing code, hiring developers contributing and funding the projects where you feed. Some companies go the extra mile and directly start new projects in promising directions, cooperate with others for a common goal or in general support development and developers.

If Oracle does all that, then ethically they will be in good standing; regardless of where their code comes from. Of course, if all of their code comes from Red Hat then they cannot be a good citizen.

I wonder...

Posted Oct 26, 2006 21:52 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

It is that and a shot across for the purchase of Jboss by Red Hat. Oracle wanted Jboss out of business/bought but not at the price Jboss wanted. Now I am guessing Oracle will do the same to Red Hat.

Not until 3rd parties support LSB

Posted Oct 26, 2006 21:46 UTC (Thu) by thyrsus (subscriber, #21004) [Link]

We were running Tao Linux (recompiled Red Hat source code) for a while, but our 3rd party software vendors specify Red Hat RHEL as the supported platform, so just to make sure those 3rd parties don't say "Tao what? Go away." to our support calls we bought a lot of Red Hat licenses. I have mixed feelings about that. It would be better if 3rd parties simply wrote to and specified compatibility with Linux Standard Base, but that would mean having an easy means to certify that a platform was LSB, and testing your code against the LSB semantics. I suspect neither is currently feasible.

If Red Hat suffers serious financial fallout from Oracle's move, then Oracle would either have to buy Red Hat or start making up for the development investment that Red Hat would be forced to curtail. I'll presume that Oracle isn't interested in killing the golden goose.

Not until 3rd parties support LSB

Posted Oct 27, 2006 4:11 UTC (Fri) by dberkholz (subscriber, #23346) [Link]

A minute of research shows it's pretty easy to certify LSB compliance -- See http://www.freestandards.org/en/Certification or http://www.freestandards.org/en/Platform_Tests

To get true "certification" however, you need to pay a steep fee. But you can show that your distribution is LSB-compliant quite easily.

Reciprocity

Posted Oct 26, 2006 22:58 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

This is a good example what open source is all about. Oracle promised in their press release that they will fix more bugs than Red Hat (something I personally find hard to believe), but they may not realize (yet) that every fix they put in and every day they prolong the life of RHEL, they enable Red Hat to do exactly the same thing, having no advantage at all.

Also, if they are really after killing Red Hat, they have to understand that fixes will stop coming from upstream if Red Hat goes out of business. With that, the brilliant patch backporting that Red Hat did with RHEL will go away too, as well as well respected hackers in the community (remember what Linus said: he doesn't trust companies, he trusts people). It wouldn't be long in such a scenario before people start asking themselves why are their daily patches coming out as quarterly jumbo fix releases and why are their Internet facing machines being compromised with exploits for which there was a fix available months ago.

Sure, Oracle have huge financial power to crush Red Hat by making a loss on OS support and not caring one bit about it. But, the tables may turn quickly if they go ahead and actually carry that out without taking on board all of the engineers that make Red Hat what it is today.

Reciprocity

Posted Oct 27, 2006 6:53 UTC (Fri) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link]

Well, Oracle are explicitly saying here that they will backport more fixes to the previous release than Red Hat does with RHEL. We shall find out, I guess. Will LWN be covering Oracle patch releases?

Certification

Posted Oct 26, 2006 23:06 UTC (Thu) by bastiaan (guest, #5170) [Link]

My first reaction was that this won't hurt Red Hat a bit, because anybody familiar with Oracle's support for Oracle products would laugh at buying support for a third party product from them.
But in many cases companies buy RHEL subscriptions simply because their customers demand a certified platform for the Oracle databases rather than for the support options. In that case a cheaper Oracle Linux may be more attractive.
Just toss away the Oracle support phone number for the protection of your mental health.

Oracle's Red Hat rip-off (Linux-Watch)

Posted Oct 27, 2006 2:05 UTC (Fri) by aotheoverlord (guest, #3993) [Link]

>> Here's a report on this on the BBC news website:
>>
>> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6088896.stm

Obviously none of those analysts have ever had to deal with Oracle support. It's not nicknamed 'Orable for nothing you know!

Support flows like water off the tap (in analysts dreams)

Posted Oct 27, 2006 5:31 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

Obviously none of those analysts have ever had to deal with Oracle support. It's not nicknamed 'Orable for nothing you know!

Or they did not even pause to think for a second about what the word "support" really means. Look at this from the BBC article:
"Current and prospective Red Hat customers now have an alternative for support from a larger, more experienced vendor

Experienced with what? Supporting Oracle products, of course. It's not at all the same thing as supporting Linux. "Support" is not some multipurpose commodity like water or gasoline...

Oracle's Red Hat rip-off (Linux-Watch)

Posted Oct 27, 2006 18:41 UTC (Fri) by ccchips (guest, #3222) [Link]

Many years ago, I was at a sales briefing from Oracle when our shop was considering databases. I off-handedly asked the chief rep there if Oracle ran or Linux. The guy got all red-faced and said: "Linux is a toy! Oracle will *never* run on that thing"

Now, they recommend it for their database. Now, they are out to do their own release of it. Now, some analysts think Read Hat should worry.

Hmmmm.....what an interesting world we live in.

Maybe open-source developers should start really thinking about application usability and feature-completeness (e.g. OCR software that works seamlessly and accurately with any scanner.)

Because, unless there's a real big conversion in Redmond, Linux and Microsoft Windows may have to duke it out bigtime.

I gave Oracle Linux a try

Posted Oct 27, 2006 22:45 UTC (Fri) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]

Downloaded it. Installed it. I think I like CentOS better. At least
their artwork and install graphics are more impressive. Hmm, I wonder if
they used CentOS as a base rather than building RHEL from scratch?!? In
some places the color scheme was all red (fitting their logo and all) and
in some places there was a bit of blue... which I thought was odd and that
is why I wondered if they used CentOS as a base.

I do have a few boxes running RHEL... but many more running CentOS. I
support Red Hat whenever I can because I know all they are doing for the
community.

Considering that Red Hat is adopting yum for RHEL5 and changing their
product lineup too... with unknown pricing... I expect Red Hat to be bold
and competitive. I mean... how does switching to yum impact Red Hat
Network? With the Xen virtualization support, I expect a lot of
shops to switch from RHEL4 to RHEL5... and if Oracle is indeed only going
to support RHEL3 and RHEL4... it makes me wonder just how much of Red
Hat's business stays with the not-latest-release... especially for new
deployments.

This sort of thing was bound to happen at some point. Heck, it could have
been (and still could be in the future) Microsoft that did it. Yeah,
Oracle was mad about the JBoss thing... but at least this will test Red
Hat's business model and make them more competitive. In the long run it
will be good for Linux... although they might have some ruff patches
ahead. This also validates Linux in yet another way.

If Red Hat can't survive this, it says one or two things:
1) Red Hat has poor management
2) The Open Source / Free Software business models (or at least Red Hat's)
can't withstand big business competition

I don't believe either of those to be true but we shall see.

I'm also hoping that this leads Red Hat back towards the home user and a
more mass-market approach... not abandoning the enterprise... but
expanding to include more market areas... but I'm not holding my breath.

A thing that should be said.

Posted Oct 28, 2006 17:56 UTC (Sat) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

In all the discussions about governments or anyone else for that matter adopting free software, the biggest argument was the independence of a single vendor supporting that software.

Here we have it: the best possible example. An independent company offering support for a Linux distribution. Yes, this is what's our argument is about. One can buy software from Redhat and be not dependent on them for support. Instead, there is a market and one can chose the best offering.

Of course, I personally would not exactly choose Oracle for support. But hey, this is the freedom we're fighting for.