Oracle takes aim at CentOS

The nature of Red Hat's business model nearly guarantees that its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution will be shadowed by clones offering the same software for no charge. It is not uncommon for people to wonder whether these RHEL clones, including CentOS, Scientific Linux, and Oracle Linux, are ultimately helpful or harmful to Red Hat. A free enterprise Linux can either serve as an entry point or an alternative for paying customers. There has been less attention paid to how the RHEL clones might affect each other; that may be about to change as a result of Oracle's new marketing initiative aimed directly at CentOS.

CentOS is the most popular of the free RHEL clones; it is widely offered to customers by hosting providers. It has become the default option for anybody wanting to run a RHEL-like system without actually paying for it. There can be no doubt that some sites would decide to pop for a real RHEL subscription if a system like CentOS were not available. At the same time, there must certainly be a steady stream of customers who started with CentOS, only to decide that Red Hat's support would be a worthwhile upgrade.

Oracle clearly has its eyes on that stream of customers. The plan seems to be to make it easy for CentOS users to switch a running system over to Oracle's distribution. And easy it is, if Oracle's instructions are to be believed; one need only download a shell script from Oracle's server and feed it, unread, to a root shell. The script will tweak some repository pointers and install a few packages, but it leaves most of the existing CentOS (or Scientific Linux) system as-is until the next update.

Why would CentOS users, who are benefiting from the efforts of a free software project, want to switch to Oracle's offering? Oracle is clearly trying to take advantage of the security update difficulties experienced by CentOS in 2011. The page reads:

Things have improved in the CentOS camp since the 2011 difficulties. The project has changed its workflow and found the sponsorship to hire a couple of developers; the recent CentOS 6.3 release surprised almost everybody with its promptness. But CentOS remains a project with limited resources and a lot of tedious work to do; it's always possible that things could fall behind again. CentOS users who were left without security updates in 2011—at least, those who are concerned about the security of their systems—cannot entirely eliminate that fear from the backs of their minds, even if things look better now.

So it is possible that Oracle is on to something here. Some CentOS users may well jump at the chance to switch to a free RHEL clone with big-company support behind it. And, when some of those users decide that paid support is worth their while, Oracle will naturally be the first provider to come to mind. This little initiative might well translate into some extra revenue for Oracle.

Of course, there could be some costs. The CentOS project is unlikely to be strengthened by having some of its users defect to Oracle. In the worst (presumably unlikely) case, CentOS could be fundamentally damaged if vast numbers of users were to vote with their feet and leave. That would leave the community with one less free enterprise distribution project. There have been a lot of complaints that CentOS is far from a truly open, community-oriented project. But anybody concerned about those issues is unlikely to find Oracle's distribution more to their liking. Oracle does make some good contributions, but community-oriented development is not, in general, among the company's greatest strengths.

Also worth keeping in mind is the fact that Oracle is making no promises that it will provide this free service for any period of time. If this effort fails to provide the desired financial results, Oracle could pull the plug on it at any time—as it did with OpenSolaris. That would leave ex-CentOS users with the choice of somehow migrating back to CentOS (assuming CentOS is still there and healthy) or becoming paid Oracle customers in a hurry. One could argue that any free (beer) distribution poses such a hazard, but a corporate-controlled distribution can only be doubly hazardous.

So this initiative by Oracle looks like it could be either a positive or a negative thing. It could increase the choices for users looking for a well-supported, highly stable, free-of-charge distribution and increase competition in the enterprise distribution space in general. Or it could just be a cynical attempt by a large corporation to profit from a free software project's success and deprive its main competitor of a potential revenue stream. Enterprise distribution users will have to make their own choice as to where their best interests lie.

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