I gave Oracle Linux a try

Posted Oct 27, 2006 22:45 UTC (Fri) by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
Parent article: Oracle's Red Hat rip-off (Linux-Watch)

Downloaded it. Installed it. I think I like CentOS better. At least
their artwork and install graphics are more impressive. Hmm, I wonder if
they used CentOS as a base rather than building RHEL from scratch?!? In
some places the color scheme was all red (fitting their logo and all) and
in some places there was a bit of blue... which I thought was odd and that
is why I wondered if they used CentOS as a base.

I do have a few boxes running RHEL... but many more running CentOS. I
support Red Hat whenever I can because I know all they are doing for the
community.

Considering that Red Hat is adopting yum for RHEL5 and changing their
product lineup too... with unknown pricing... I expect Red Hat to be bold
and competitive. I mean... how does switching to yum impact Red Hat
Network? With the Xen virtualization support, I expect a lot of
shops to switch from RHEL4 to RHEL5... and if Oracle is indeed only going
to support RHEL3 and RHEL4... it makes me wonder just how much of Red
Hat's business stays with the not-latest-release... especially for new
deployments.

This sort of thing was bound to happen at some point. Heck, it could have
been (and still could be in the future) Microsoft that did it. Yeah,
Oracle was mad about the JBoss thing... but at least this will test Red
Hat's business model and make them more competitive. In the long run it
will be good for Linux... although they might have some ruff patches
ahead. This also validates Linux in yet another way.

If Red Hat can't survive this, it says one or two things:
1) Red Hat has poor management
2) The Open Source / Free Software business models (or at least Red Hat's)
can't withstand big business competition

I don't believe either of those to be true but we shall see.

I'm also hoping that this leads Red Hat back towards the home user and a
more mass-market approach... not abandoning the enterprise... but
expanding to include more market areas... but I'm not holding my breath.