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Oracle's repackaged RHEL
For weeks the rumor mill has been full of guesses about what Oracle's big
Linux news, if any, might be. None of them, however, were correct. In the
end, Oracle has announced
a competing support program for Red Hat Linux. It will be most interesting
to see how things will evolve from here. At least nobody is complaining
anymore that you can't get support for Linux.
Oracle's program is easy to understand:
Oracle starts with Red Hat Linux, removes Red Hat trademarks, and
then adds Linux bug fixes... Every time Red Hat distributes a new
version we will resynchronize with their code. All we add are bug
fixes, which are immediately available to Red Hat and the rest of
the community.
Essentially, Oracle is offering a version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with the serial numbers filed off. To maintain compatibility, Oracle also promises to file the serial numbers off of future RHEL releases and distribute them as well. All for rather less money than Red Hat charges. If that's not enough to entice customers to switch, Oracle also tosses in a bit of old-fashioned SCO FUD as a bonus. One cannot help but wonder just what Oracle is thinking here. Rather than (as some had guessed) offering its own Linux distribution, it is reaffirming the primacy of a competitor's offering. The added value claimed by Oracle - the bug fixes that, says Oracle, Red Hat is failing to provide to its customers - will, by Oracle's own admission, be immediately available for Red Hat to incorporate back into its offerings as well. Meanwhile Oracle is openly hitching a free ride on Red Hat's work with the clear intent of cutting off the revenue stream which supports that work. If Oracle is successful, it will kill the goose laying the golden eggs that it is selling. There are reasons to believe that Oracle might not be as successful as the stock market evidently fears. Oracle claims Linux expertise, and it has hired a few developers and made some real contributions. But Oracle's contributions and expertise are both tiny compared to Red Hat's; customers who are paying attention will understand that. Oracle will always be a little behind Red Hat, following Red Hat's lead. The quality of Oracle's support is not always praised by all of its customers, and the challenge of dealing with Oracle's lawyers is legendary. It is hard to imagine why people who are concerned about the quality of the support they are paying for would not go directly to the source. So what is Oracle up to? One line of reasoning says that Oracle is simply trying to lower Red Hat's stock price to make an eventual acquisition cheaper. Certainly people seem to have no problem believing that Oracle would be willing to use this sort of tactic. If Oracle is truly trying to soften up the competition through a sort of shock and awe campaign, however, it is hard to see that there would be a whole lot worth acquiring by the end. Many of the core developers who make Red Hat what it is might find themselves unwilling to go along with the new Oracle overlords; quite a few of them may try to find another place to be. What Oracle might be trying to do, instead, is to begin building up its Linux expertise and the beginnings of a customer base in preparation for an eventual fork of RHEL into its own distribution. The "bug fixes" could grow over time until a point arrives where moving from Oracle's Linux back to RHEL is no longer an easy thing to do. Perhaps a few proprietary pieces would help to solidify the lock-in. If this plan went well, customers and engineers would drift in Oracle's direction with no acquisition effort required. Rather than jumping into the distribution business from the beginning, Oracle could be dipping some toes into the water to see what happens. The arrival of free-riders in the commercial Linux world was always inevitable, even if few people expected one the size of Oracle. In a way, we are all free riders; even the heaviest contributor to the free software community gets far more back than they could ever put in. Companies like Red Hat and Oracle are not selling the software; they are selling the quality of the service they provide. As long as customers pay attention to what they are really buying and do not allow vendors to try to lock them into a specific distribution, we should all come out ahead. (See also: Red Hat's "Unfakeable Linux" response to Oracle's announcement). (Log in to post comments)
Oracle's repackaged RHEL Posted Oct 30, 2006 19:31 UTC (Mon) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] I guess I just don't see the doom-and-gloom in this announcement. It seems to me that the onlypeople for whom this announcement is relevant for is big existing Oracle customers. They will provide a fully integrated software stack, boot the Oracle CD and you have the whole OS and DB service in one shot, and Oracle will support the whole stack themselves. Right now the support services at Oracle and RedHat do spend some useless time finger-pointing when you have a support request that crosses both boundaries (db problem because of kernel problem).
While RedHat has made a bit of hay from the Oracle RAC system, I would think that they have plenty
Oracle's repackaged RHEL Posted Oct 30, 2006 19:59 UTC (Mon) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link] """Oracle's program is easy to understand:
Oracle starts with Red Hat Linux, removes Red Hat trademarks, and then adds Linux bug fixes... Every time Red Hat distributes a new version we will resynchronize with their code. All we add are bug fixes, which are immediately available to Red Hat and the rest of the community.
Essentially, Oracle is offering a version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with the serial numbers filed off.
Serial numbers filed off???
If the serial numbers were not filed off RedHat would hit the distributor with a Cease and Desist letter faster than you can say "Perry Mason".
Just ask the CentOS guys.
And that's what RedHat did to Cheap Bytes, resulting in "Pink Tie" Linux.
I suspect that this tempest in a teapot will end up as a relative non-event in Linux history.
The sky is not falling.
Will Oracle always trail Red Hat? Posted Oct 30, 2006 20:43 UTC (Mon) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] The crux of the matter is whether Oracle will actually monitor vulnerabilities and deliver fixes before Red Hat.I wonder what would Oracle do if its customers demand a fix for an issue not yet addressed by Red Hat. It's hard for me to imagine Oracle saying with a straight face that they are still waiting for Red Hat, especially if the patch is known, and so are the exploits. If Oracle will trail Red Hat even if Red Hat fails to provide a timely fix, the Oracle's distribution will be seen as another CentOS or White Box Linux - a useful thing, but hardly worth any serious amount of money, with or without support.
Will Oracle always trail Red Hat? Posted Oct 30, 2006 21:59 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] My guess is that the extra fixes they are 'saying that Red Hat skips' are the various Oracle patches that have not been accepted into kernel/etc core. Most seem to be memory issues and disk io.
Will Oracle always trail Red Hat? Posted Oct 31, 2006 0:30 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] There are some really `fun' (i.e. horrific and grossly broken) GCC changesas well. As far as I know Oracle never dared submit them: they just instruct everyone wanting to use the (vile) Pro*C precompiler to hack up the GCC tooldir headers in a number of disgusting ways.
And as for the foul stub tricks they played with glibc to try to get
Engineering expertise this ain't.
Will Oracle always trail Red Hat? Posted Nov 2, 2006 15:51 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] I'm rather curious as to what those changes are, and why they're so horrible.
Will Oracle always trail Red Hat? Posted Nov 14, 2006 20:47 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] They reverted part but not all of the __builtin_va_args patch,specifically the part that touched code in <stdarg.h> in the include/ directory under the GCC tooldir: apparently doing this was easier than teaching the awful Pro*C about __builtin_va_arg et al, or fixing it so it didn't try to fish stuff out from under the GCC tooldir at all.
Of course this can't possibly work because the other half of the patch was
Hence `horrible'.
Oracle does not have the best reputation for fast patches Posted Oct 31, 2006 16:04 UTC (Tue) by emk (guest, #1128) [Link] One of the more frequent criticisms of Oracle's security team is that they are slow to respond. Their "critical patches", for example, are rolled out on a quarterly schedule.
So RedHat may not have much to fear from Oracle getting patches out faster.
Oracle's repackaged RHEL Posted Oct 30, 2006 20:48 UTC (Mon) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link] Another possibility: Oracle may be trying to demonstrate that building a business on open source software is not viable. If they can drive Red Hat out of business, they will have a very convicing argument (directed toward their customers) for not basing one's business on open source software. It would eliminate a very large competitive threat to their core business.
Oracle's repackaged RHEL Posted Oct 31, 2006 12:03 UTC (Tue) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] That would be a study in pyrrhic victory.I guess Redmond would rejoice, perhaps.
Oracle trying to show that OSS isn't viable? Posted Nov 3, 2006 16:59 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] OK, trying it and failing miserably doesn't prove anything...
Oracle's repackaged RHEL Posted Oct 30, 2006 21:08 UTC (Mon) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link] I think it's fairly obvious that Oracle is trying to coopt and ultimately destroy the independent FOSS/Linux community. Red Hat is the biggest corporate player in that field; first they targeted MySQL (via InnoDB/BerkeleyDB), now Red Hat. Once you kill Red Hat, Novell doesn't have much ground left to stand on. Who's left then? IBM? A bunch of community projects that rely upon Oracle to continue to deliver the base platform they depend upon?
I actually don't think it's all doom and gloom, and ultimately Oracle will fail. Still, I'm surprised at the lack of response by many at such an obviously hostile move.
Oracle's repackaged RHEL Posted Oct 30, 2006 23:17 UTC (Mon) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link] While I agree with the premise of your post, I don't see how Red Hat isthe "ground" that Novel stands on.
Oracle's repackaged RHEL Posted Oct 31, 2006 1:04 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Well Novell's OpenSuse probably benifits greatly from Redhat's work on GCC and Linux 2.6 for specifics.
But that's just how things work.
Oracle can't kill Redhat. If they buy them the eginneers would just quit and work for somebody else. It may actually end up being a BIG benifit for Novell as they are a likely target for ex-Redhat programmers.
It's the talent, the employees that make Redhat remarkable. Oracle can't take that. But Novell probably could hire that.
What Oracle CAN take is credibility of the commercial viability of OSS software. Redhat is the poster boy for open source profitability and if Oracle kills them off then that would be a huge blow.
But I don't think anymore that Oracle is trying to realy hurt Redhat. I think now that they are trying to pressure them.
I bet that Oracle want's to put pressure on Redhat to make them easier to deal with and make Redhat lower their prices for support.
Look at Oracle's major competition right now.. It's not Oracle vs MySQL (call back in 7 years I expect)...
But it's Microsoft's SQL Server.
I don't think Oracle gives a shit about Redhat anymore. I dont' think they are concerned about MySQL or anything like that like I thought they may be. I don't think that they have that much insight.
I think that they are looking at Microsoft and are scared that Windows 2003 with SQL Server is a more attractive and inexpensive solution then what you can get with Redhat and Oracle.
I think that now this is a effort to get Redhat to lower prices and barring that then user 'unbreakable' linux to provide a highly integrated and focused environment against what Microsoft can offer.
Oracle's repackaged RHEL Posted Oct 31, 2006 7:47 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Still, I'm surprised at the lack of response by many at such an obviously hostile move.Well, what can you do. Stay away from proprietary software if possible, I guess, but that's already in the program for most of us. Anyway, you are quite right. Oracle is a proprietary vendor and as such, it is no friend of Free Software. They probably play with a lot of scenarios where everyone uses Free databases and their business shrinks into oblivion. Maybe we should use Oracle's announcement as an endorsement of Free Software, and push PostgreSQL and MySQL more actively?
Oracle's repackaged RHEL Posted Oct 31, 2006 8:46 UTC (Tue) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] Maybe we should use Oracle's announcement as an endorsement of Free Software, and push PostgreSQL and MySQL more actively? Your comment reminded me that Red Hat once had a RHDB offering which was basically RHEL + PostgreSQL + a number of apps + support. This lasted something like two weeks (and I suspect that Oracle had a lot to do with RH ceasing to market it). Maybe it's time to resurrect it ?
Oracle's repackaged RHEL Posted Oct 31, 2006 9:08 UTC (Tue) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] Redhat employs at least one core PostgreSQL developer. AFAICT, if you're a Redhat customer with a PostgreSQL, they have experts who can help you.
See here: http://sources.redhat.com/rhdb/
I have no personal experience with them though.
Oracle's repackaged RHEL Posted Oct 31, 2006 11:16 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Maybe it's time to resurrect it ?Sounds interesting. Maybe an offering in the ERP area would also make sense... if Oracle can do infrastructure, Red Hat surely can do "solutions"!
Oracle's repackaged RHEL Posted Oct 31, 2006 15:39 UTC (Tue) by gouyou (subscriber, #30290) [Link] Time for RedHat to support the Compiere fork (ADempiere) and have it ported to PostgreSQL (see previous article).
Oracle's repackaged RHEL Posted Nov 1, 2006 22:12 UTC (Wed) by gwithrow (guest, #3156) [Link] I had this thought also, but from a DBA perspective. I've been running Oracle on Linux (SuSE) since early 2002 and I love it. But I got to tell you it took a lot of effort and a fair amount of consultant money to develop the "cookbook" to effectively install the minimum amount of Linux necessary to run just the Oracle database part as fast as possible in a secure fashion. I'm pretty sure that Red Hat could make a little money and put a dart into ol' Larry by working with IBM or SAP to come up with a targeted release (and maintenance plan) that ran DB2 the same way.
Oracle's repackaged RHEL Posted Oct 30, 2006 21:47 UTC (Mon) by aba (subscriber, #24118) [Link] Actually, I don't see where the big difference is between what Oracle does with RHEL to what Canonical did with Debian - freeriding seems to be extremly popular currently. Just that Debian isn't so dependend to make money as RedHat is.
Oracle's repackaged RHEL Posted Oct 30, 2006 22:36 UTC (Mon) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] That comparison might make sense if Oracle had gone after Fedora insteadof RHEL. But Oracle went after Red Hat's source of income; Canonical isn't doing that to Debian.
The comparison makes no sense Posted Oct 31, 2006 1:34 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Canonical's paying a lot of people who now contribute to both Ubuntu and Debian. They are doing their own improvements to the system, very substantial improvements, many of which are showing up in Debian as well. They aren't free-riding. Oracle isn't doing their own distro at all, they are effectively duplicating CentOS's model.
The comparison makes no sense Posted Oct 31, 2006 5:32 UTC (Tue) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link] > Oracle isn't doing their own distro at all, they are effectively duplicating CentOS's model.
Nope. Look at RHEL as two seperate components, the software and the support. RHEL rebuild efforts to date have focused on making the software Free with Support being mailing lists and wikis.
Now we have Oracle trying to sell a rebuild with a support agreement. The software is essentially the same as with any other rebuild, strip trademarks and try to keep up with patches. Support on the other hand is a different kettle of fish. Being downstream means they will always be at least a little behind on patches and an Oracle customer will have to know RH isn't going to be expending much effort closing trouble tickets submitted by them. So the question will come down to whether Oracle can muster the resources to give the customer a level of support that meets enterprise expectations. Cutting the pricetag will get them into some doors but if the service isn't there it won't keep em in the game.
Of course there has been at least as much grumbling on the RHEL lists about quality of support issues as over their pricing so it will be interesting to see if this new competition hurts RH or forces them to kick it up a notch.
Another major difference between Oracle's rebuild and the others is Oracle appears to have fully cloned RHN instead of using Yum as the package maintaince tool of choice.
The comparison makes no sense Posted Oct 31, 2006 13:01 UTC (Tue) by skvidal (subscriber, #3094) [Link] 1. they're using current: current.tigris.org2. they're shipping yum with it 3. it's amusing b/c rhel5b1 appears to be including yum
-sv
The comparison makes no sense Posted Oct 31, 2006 19:11 UTC (Tue) by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406) [Link] Yes, Seth your baby has replaced up2date in rhel5b1, let's hopethat they will fix some problems in yum: o poor proxy support (rewrite to use libcurl, yeah!) o speed improvement (yum-metadater-parser is fine, but there is something else that is broken)
No job offer from Oracle, yet? :-)
The comparison makes no sense Posted Oct 31, 2006 13:01 UTC (Tue) by aba (subscriber, #24118) [Link] We cannot know what Oracle will really do - we will see.
But we can know what Canonical really does - they speak far more about giving back than doing. Of course, some of Canonical employees contribute to Debian - but I'm quite sure there are already quite some Oracle employees who contribute to open source as well. Just that Oracle don't put so much emphasize on it as Canonical does.
Oracle's repackaged RHEL Posted Oct 30, 2006 23:23 UTC (Mon) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] The article's view is from Mount Linux. I wonder what the view is from Mount Database? Maybe Oracle see its long term revevenue under threat from the open source databases like MySQL and Postgres? Oracle very cleverly removed one of the major attractions of MySQL, thus delaying MySQL's move onto Oracle's turf. Maybe this is a different strategy to address the basic problem of Oracle's long term revenue. If Oracle can convince Oracle-using sites to move to Oracle for its database and operating system maintenance then Oracle sees no fall in revenue if those sites move from Oracle to MySQL/Postgres. And if Oracle owns the ERP/CRM/whatever appplication too then they can capture nearly all of the customer's recurrent spend (missing out on the server maintenance isn't a problem since the margings are small, but a branding program and related charge could capture some of that revenue too). I'm not sure how practical this is. Red Hat's list prices are very high. Only a mug would be paying anywhere near that price, especially considering that you've still got to pay for hardware maintenance and perhaps for application software support on top of Red Hat's charges. But the same could be true of Oracle's list prices too. An Oracle-using customer is already forcing Oracle to incur most of the costs in supporting that customer. The additional costs for supporting Linux is very small, especially as Oracle can start by free riding on Red Hat's efforts. If Oracle can maintain its outrageous margins on Oracle support and lock in the customer for the future then Oracle may not care in the short run if it makes little margin on Linux support for that customer. The view from Mount Linux says that Oracle's major problem with offering Linux support is the credibility of its technical offering. But the view from Mount CIO is that Oracle is the more credible supplier.
what? Posted Oct 31, 2006 1:37 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] If Oracle can convince Oracle-using sites to move to Oracle for its database and operating system maintenance then Oracle sees no fall in revenue if those sites move from Oracle to MySQL/Postgres.Um, you might want to look at the numbers again. Red Hat's prices are cheap compared to what Oracle charges for its proprietary software, and Oracle is proposing to undercut Red Hat on price. If they lose customers to MySQL or Postgres, just what is going to keep Larry Ellison in fancy sailboats? You can't be a billionaire on CheapBytes' revenue stream.
Oracle cannot acquire Red Hat Posted Oct 31, 2006 1:31 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Hostile takeovers don't work in the software industry, unless the purpose of the takeover is to just destroy the target (like Oracle's takeover of Peoplesoft) for the purpose of eliminating a competitor. Most of the talent at Red Hat would just leave.Anyway, undercutting the competitor's offerings can cut both ways. I'm sure that there are Oracle customers whose needs would be adequately met by MySQL or PostgreSQL, for example. I suppose that Oracle could then turn around and pass Red Hat's improvements to free DB's that compete with Oracle on to their customers, right?
Oracle cannot acquire Red Hat Posted Oct 31, 2006 14:41 UTC (Tue) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link] """Hostile takeovers don't work in the software industry,"""
Especially when less than 50% of the company is publicly traded.
Especially when less than 50% of the company is publicly traded. Posted Nov 1, 2006 11:02 UTC (Wed) by gravious (subscriber, #7662) [Link] What do you mean by this and who are you referring to? Thanks!
Especially when less than 50% of the company is publicly traded. Posted Nov 2, 2006 10:08 UTC (Thu) by gyles (guest, #1600) [Link] Presumably that the founders & employees of Red Hat own over 50%, making a hostile takeover really difficult on the open market.
It has nothing to do with RedHat Posted Nov 2, 2006 6:07 UTC (Thu) by ssavitzky (guest, #2855) [Link] I continue to be surprised that nobody else has figured out that this move has nothing to do with RedHat, other than the fact that it's the distro that most Oracle customers were using. It's really about having a single vendor, so that Oracle can compete successfully with the only other single-source enterprise vendor: Microsoft.
Until now, customers had only one obvious choice if they wanted to get their database and their OS from the same vendor. Now they have two.
Oracle's repackaged RHEL Posted Nov 4, 2006 17:51 UTC (Sat) by forbdonut (subscriber, #21577) [Link] Hi. We've been using RHEL 4 in production for a while now. I'm pretty fed up though b/c every kernel update Redhat released has had a show-stopping bug for us. So I feel Redhat's support, which we pay for, has been lacking . So in this sense I understand why Oracle wants to sell support. I assume they have customers which are as irritated as us. Cheers.
Oracle's repackaged RHEL Posted Nov 9, 2006 13:12 UTC (Thu) by treadwm (guest, #41592) [Link] Unfortunately I've had the same miserable experience with Oracle updates and "support" in general. The thought of Oracle trying to dispense Linux support frightens me. The only silver lining is that at least they would have to support the kernel tweaks and fixes they pass off on us.
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