History Repeats [LWN.net]

History Repeats

Posted Oct 20, 2010 4:43 UTC (Wed) by ldo (guest, #40946)
Parent article: Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

Remember when Oracle first announced its Unbreakable Linux a few years ago? That it was simply going to repackage its own build of RHEL at a cut price, and somehow totally steal the market away from Red Hat? How well did that pan out?

Not very well, as it turned out; Oracle struggled to achieve 0.1% of the market penetration of Red Hat.

Too many analyses implicitly assume the economics of closed-source software development and apply them to open source; closed-source software is very expensive to develop, open source is not. Closed-source software needs carefully-controlled distribution channels to preserve the enforcement of the licence; open source does not. In closed-source, a choice of competing products means fragmentation; in open-source, it does not. Competing closed-source products tend not to have any incentive to offer interoperability to their customers; open-source products most certainly do.

In short, in closed source, little guys either turn into big guys (by growth or by being acquired by big guys) or they die. Whereas in open source, the little guys are unkillable; there will always be lots of little guys scurrying around in open source, because thats where the vitality of the market comes from.

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History Repeats

Posted Oct 20, 2010 5:33 UTC (Wed) by AndreE (guest, #60148) [Link] (1 responses)

More significantly, how could Oracle even run the Unbreakable Linux campaign if RHEL wasn't free software?

History Repeats

Posted Oct 20, 2010 6:35 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Easily. Proprietary doesn't mean what you think it means (throw you dictionary in the bin). It means:

> "differentiated with a view to achieving competitive advantage in the market (and possible some degree of customer lock-in)"

So, when Oracle copied RHEL, that copy was also proprietary. This time to Oracle, because it:

> "differentiated with a view to achieving competitive advantage in the market (and possible some degree of customer lock-in)"

So, these two identical copies are differentiating nicely and locking folks in. Because, you see, if you develop a program that runs under RHEL/Oracle Linux, it won't run anywhere else but on those two proprietary, locked in systems. OK?

Now, if you take the new Oracle Linux, with that modified kernel, in that case you cannot:

1. Port those patches to anything.

2. Run anything but Oracle software on it.

3. Run Red Hat proprietary software on it, such as OpenJDK/JBoss, unless you want the server to explode.

I can go all day with this nonsense... ;-)