Commitment to Open (Red Hat News) [LWN.net]

Commitment to Open (Red Hat News)

Posted Mar 7, 2011 14:57 UTC (Mon) by avr (guest, #27673)
Parent article: Commitment to Open (Red Hat News)

It's likely Oracle is strategically salting the earth here. Normally it would be foolish to try and disrupt a business on which your own depends to some degree, but with their latest aquisition they now have two enterprise operating systems on offer. Judging by Oracle's corporate personality, it's not hard to see which one is going to become the red-hatted stepchild, and which one the much celebrated sun.

"Unbreakable" might become nothing more than a crowbar to pry customers from redhat folowing the formula, lure them in with lower prices, provide sub-par support and blame it on the uncontrolled nature of 'upstream', 'upgrade' to controlled Solaris.

If it sounds farfetched, consider that the most profitable thing for Oracle regarding their operating system or 'integrated stack' business would be for redhat to stop existing in their current form; not to replace the void with their own support and GNU/Linux offering, but to replace it with what would be marketed as a *real* in-house OS instead.

The bottom line:
Redhat is, as the expression goes, worth more dead than alive to Oracle since the aquisition of Solaris.

The insidious part here is that it's more effective to slowly sabotage from the inside.

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It's not so simple, again...

Posted Mar 7, 2011 15:38 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

"Unbreakable" might become nothing more than a crowbar to pry customers from redhat folowing the formula, lure them in with lower prices, provide sub-par support and blame it on the uncontrolled nature of 'upstream', 'upgrade' to controlled Solaris.

Right. But Oracle found that it's not so easy to switch everyone to OEL so they inroduced intermediate step: they offer support for RHEL! And this is where RedHat wants to draw the line: if wants to make it perfectly clear that crappy Oracle support is problem of not 'uncontrolled nature of upstream' but the property of quite controlled upstream where only RedHat customers have access to the vital information needed to support RHEL. Thus people will know from the onset that Oracle's support is not equal to RedHat's support.

Will it work? Who knowx. But the situation where RedHat develops RHEL and then Oracle and Novel get the money for support is clearly not a viable long-term solution...