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

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

Posted Oct 26, 2006 19:04 UTC (Thu) by ronaldcole (guest, #1462)
In reply to: Oracle's Red Hat rip-off (Linux-Watch) by tjc
Parent article: Oracle's Red Hat rip-off (Linux-Watch)

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.

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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 (guest, #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!