Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore
Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore
The Gerson Lehrman Group's site is carrying this
missive from Jeff Gould giving a rather wild-eyed analyst view of
Oracle's enterprise kernel update. "Linux has been propagandized for
years as the next Unix, the 'good' Unix that would leverage the noble
democratic principles of open source to avoid the proprietary pitfalls of
AIX vs. Solaris vs. HP-UX and all the other now forgotten exemplars of
'bad' vendor-exclusive Unix. But Larry Ellison and the Google kids have
served notice that things aren't going to work out that way. Having
understood that the GPL open source license that governs Linux is only a
fig leaf, they've discovered that there is nothing to prevent them from
rolling their own de facto private versions of Linux while still respecting
the letter of the open source law.
"