Is Red Hat in financial trouble? [LWN.net]

Is Red Hat in financial trouble?

Posted Mar 1, 2011 6:40 UTC (Tue) by rodgerd (guest, #58896)
In reply to: Is Red Hat in financial trouble? by NightMonkey
Parent article: Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

They aren't in financial trouble, but they're pretty clearly Oracle's next target. Oracle have been trash-talking them very publicly and aggressively, and I know they're coming into RedHat shops with carrots ("We'll give you OEL for 80% less than RHEL") and sticks ("Oracle DB will be reducing RHEL to a second-class citizen, we don't support virtualisation on any platform except OEL and Solaris" are two). This is pretty much the strategy they follow with many of their aquisition - aggressive assaults to drive down market value, then picking up the company and migrating the customers to Oracle's preferred offerings.

One can argue whether *this* response is a good one or not, but RedHat would be complete idiots not to be ready to fight. And while those Linux users who are stuck in the 1999 /. "RedHat are the Microsoft of Linux" view of the universe, I invite folks to consider what Oracle have done to Sun, MySQL, and Java when they consider whether this is would be a desireable outcome.

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Is Red Hat in financial trouble?

Posted Mar 1, 2011 17:04 UTC (Tue) by brunowolff (guest, #71160) [Link] (1 responses)

Maybe Red hat should work on getting Postgres certified to use to use with a variety of applications with support from whoever provides the application. There are a lot of people running Oracle's database that probably wouldn't need to if they could still get support using Postgres instead of Oracle in their stack.

Is Red Hat in financial trouble?

Posted Mar 1, 2011 17:16 UTC (Tue) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]

That would be great, and there are ex-RedHatters doing that in other companies, as it happens. Unfortunately the open source world appears hell-bent on MySQL. I see apps in our part of the software world dropping PostgreSQL as often as picking it up.