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

> 1) "enterprise Linux" is perceived and treated by customers as if it were proprietary software and

> 2) it is entirely possibe to "add value" to a piece of Free Software that effectively locks in customers.

Yeah, I get what Jeff is _trying_ to argue. He's saying that there is essentially no big difference between proprietary Oracle/Windows and RHEL. His words:

> But this doesn’t change the fact that these distros embody competitive differentiation strategies that are no different in kind from those embodied in traditional closed source software such as Oracle’s 11g database or Microsoft Windows.

Of course, I disagree with this, because it is fundamentally not true. Differentiation strategies of Oracle/Microsoft are vastly different to that of Red Hat. As was noted before, nobody can just take Oracle's 11g database and build support business around it. Nobody can patch it or improve it. It's not open source. Ditto Windows. So, Oracle/Microsoft clearly differentiate from others as the only possible source for that DB/OS. Red Hat does not. Not even RHEL (case in point: Oracle).

However, open source in itself doesn't guarantee anything to a business except some free raw materials. Running a successful business is no easy thing. What Jeff sees as proprietary model is just a business doing it's job right, so competitors are few and far between. And Jeff's fantasies that open source fanboys think that open source somehow cannot mean strong and ruthless business is just that - fantasies.

I have no idea what Jeff would have Red Hat do. Have them certify a non-existent "common" Linux distro against some software? Have them provide training for that same non-existent "common" distro? I mean, seriously. Red Hat's brand is proprietary, yes. Well, thanks Jeff, we didn't notice this before.

In terms of competition, if Canonical were serious about what they do, they could threaten Red Hat significantly. So could Novell. The first lot are less about you bread-and-butter computer room stuff. The second lot are kind of a hybrid between open source and proprietary software and seem to be struggling financially.

And now comes Oracle. As you say:

> Oracle knows exactly how this works, and how little principles about freedom matter in the absence of endless time and resources.

Well, it's not really about what they think about freedom. If they want to support an open source distro, they have to be embedded in the community. If they are not, their distro will be just like OpenSolaris - open source on paper and in the corridors of the company. A lot of Red Hat guys are the real, "old" open source hackers. If Oracle wants to do it right, they have to either snatch some of those or groom their own.

That, IMHO, will be the real make-or-break of Oracle enterprise Linux. And it's not because of some moral superiority they'd get by paying open source folks. No. It's because they would then live and breathe that stuff, just like Red Hat folks do.