Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

A couple things you need to understand about Redhat is that any exclusivity of their code is NOT the key for their success. It's their methodology and their willingness to work with anybody and everybody and their willingness to share and abandon exclusive features to the whole community is what makes them successful; relatively to the hundreds of other Linux companies that have tried to do the same.

They aggressively work with upstream developers and will often make sure that the improvements they ship are widely available to many different distributions and corporations well in advance to Redhat shipping anything. KVM, improvements to GCC, driver enhancements to the kernel, performance improvements, usability improvements, security improvements. Redhat developers a lot of features that end up in other distributions for a long time before they ever end up in Redhat's shipping product. Not always, but this is often the case.

This is what makes Linux's 'fragmentation' different from Unix. With Unix it was fragmented because of restrictions placed on use. Those optimizations and proprietary features are associated with very high costs. With Linux it's only fragmented because people are optimizing, each in their own way, to fill nitches and functionality that is unique for their own situations and desires. So-called 'proprietary features' have no cost associated with them other then the work you have to put into implementing them (which is very low because all the code is already written and debugged for you). It's almost all benefits. There is nothing that Redhat ships with their software that cannot be duplicated by anybody else with a little effort.

Oracle should know this better then anybody because Oracle created their own clone called 'Unbreakable Linux' based directly off of software downloaded from ftp.redhat.com. Although they did not do as a good as a job as CentOS does.

Redhat knows that their source code improvements, design choices, and their optimizations need to be done because they benefit their customers. Exclusivity for exclusivity sake has NO benefits for customers at all. Customers don't buy the Redhat OS because that is the only place they can get that OS or those features. (because it very obviously is not true). They buy it because Redhat works hard with a huge number of different people and corporations to provide the best possible software in the best possible way for their customers. Redhat has a large pool of knowledge and the connections and partnerships with all sorts of different industries that their customers find extremely valuable.

Support options, ISV certifications, government validations and certifications, approval processes in large corporations, hardware vendor support, etc etc. Willingness to work with all the GNU/FSF/Kernel.org/GCC/etc type folks in the world, on terms favorable and preferred to everybody involved. Those partnerships and relationships and the depth and breadth of knowledge that Redhat has about it's own OS and it's own code base is what is valuable. No body else offers that sort of value in a OS; short of Microsoft, and Microsoft's costs are exponentially higher then Redhat's.

Redhat does not 'tolerate' other people using their code... Redhat benefits heavily from the independent developers and other projects that use that code for different purposes. Projects like CentOS benefit Redhat because customers can use CentOS to keep deployment costs low without raising the cost of supporting those customers one bit. They can pick and choose and pay Redhat based on the value that Redhat's services and support can get them. This way customers can have the highest level of utility from the money that Redhat receives from them. This is true with almost all the software that Redhat ships.

To put it another way: There is no reason to pay Redhat money besides the fact that subscribing to Redhat's support contracts will improve your own organization and lower costs. If you want the features that Redhat offers then you do not have to pay a dime.

This is why Oracle will fail and will keep on failing if they think they can just make their own highly optimized version of Linux and think people will buy into that. It's just plain wrong-headed thinking.

The stuff your talking about has been tried many different times by many different Linux companies and it always is going to lead to higher development costs, longer development timelines, and less stable software. Oracle will have higher development costs and the complexity and size of the QA process necessary to compete with Redhat will be something that Redhat themselves do not have to deal with. Redhat thrives because they have been able to avoid that trap and have been willing to abandon exclusivity of code and OS features as a reason for people to pay them money.

Right now Linux is a highly optimized and mature server platform. There is very very little that Oracle can do that will make their special Linux version perform in ways that cannot be duplicated by anybody running Redhat, Debian, Ubuntu, or anything else. If Oracle can produce a packaged product that is easy to use and is cheaper then running Redhat on a Dell or other vendor, then sure they can make some money. But Oracle's track record is not hot in those regards.