It's not about Oracle [LWN.net]

It's not about Oracle

Posted Mar 5, 2011 17:25 UTC (Sat) by sciurus (subscriber, #58832)
In reply to: It's not about Oracle by wzzrd
Parent article: Commitment to Open (Red Hat News)

I'm pretty sure that is a dig at Oracle. Another company can't offer "direct" support on RHEL, since you can't access Red Hat's yum repositories without paying.

$ sudo yum check-update
Loaded plugins: rhnplugin
There was an error communicating with RHN.
RHN support will be disabled.

Error Message:
Service not enabled for system profile: "example.com"
Error Class Code: 31
Error Class Info:
This system does not have a valid entitlement for Red Hat Network.
Please visit https://rhn.redhat.com/rhn/systems/SystemEntitlements.do
or login at https://rhn.redhat.com, and from the "Your RHN" tab,
select "Subscription Management" to enable RHN service for this system.

However, they can rebuild Red Hat from the source RPMs and sell support for it. Even better, they can disable some features of other software they produce (e.g. database smart flash cache, see http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E11882_01/server.112/e...) unless it's running on their derivative.

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It's not about Oracle

Posted Mar 9, 2011 0:21 UTC (Wed) by tmassey (guest, #52228) [Link]

That Oracle link is potentially scary.

I've always thought the endgame for Oracle was to leverage the database support all the way down to OS and now hardware. Companies are already used to writing big checks to Oracle for database support: why not a little more and let Oracle own the stack? You might even get a better value. No finger-pointing: Oracle owns *everything*.

In fact, one of Oracle's biggest competitors is in the same position: IBM. With DB2 and AIX on POWER, IBM owns the whole stack, too. IBM leverages this.

If Oracle is now adding database features that specifically check kernel provenance, that's real ugly for shops using Oracle. How could you use anything *but* their kernel?

But what is Oracle's strategy if they succeed in killing Red Hat? Solaris?