Apathy
is rampant and contagious. Is there any good business reason to switch.
This time last year, Oracle's Unbreakable Linux Network launched at OpenWorld to much fanfare. It was supposed to be a Red Hat killer. It has had as much impact upon Red Hat has a dead sheep. Larry Ellison says this is going to change. During his OpenWorld keynote this year, the Oracle CEO said the company means business next …
perhaps Larry should get his own software house to a functional level first. the recent Q&A hosted by Ellison himself, regarding Oracle's Fusion project, indicates that they have trouble dealing with the product line they already have.
if Oracle wants to be better, faster and smarter than RedHat, it would help if the company was at least as effective as RedHat is right now. this does not appear to be the case. Larry's ponderous monster looks like the snake that ate an elephant, and is wondering how to go about digesting the meal.
considering Mr. Ellison's (nonexistent) record of friendly cooperation with external entities, i'd say RH has a sizable advantage - RH has no shortage of players who want to partner with the 800-pound Linux gorilla. quite the congenial ape it is, too, by most accounts.
one would think RH would be paying attention to Ubuntu, not to Larry (he does go on though, doesn't he?). Shuttleworth's creature appears to be a far more effective and agile competitor, a velociraptor to Oracle's brontosaurus.
Oracle's strategy - especially it's marketting - has been wrong from the start, bordering on the suicidal. They have pushed themselves down the path of being confrontational to RH rather than announcing themselves as just another Linux distro. This means they have set a perception goal that they must take business from RH to prove their success before they can move on to attacking the Windows and UNIX installed base. TBH, this is madness. Most of the decision makers that put in RH (or SuSE, or any other Linux) had to fight long and hard to get senior management to agree to the idea, they had to show that RH could do the job and give the right level of support, and RH (and Novell) spent a lot of time and effort building up relationships with their customers. And Oracle expects those customers to just roll over for an inferior offering just because it's cheaper? I sometimes wonder how Ellison got rich in the first place.
I've never used Oracle. I gather you have to pay for it. Paying for software is not something I am in the habit of doing ..... I think I might have paid for a DOS game, once.
If you pay the full price for Oracle, do you get the complete Source Code? Just like you do with Postgres or MySQL, which you *don't* have to pay for? And if you don't get the Source Code, then what's the point of paying for it?
Its pretty clear that Oracle Linux isn't supposed to do anything except stick in Red Hat's side and punish them for acquiring JBoss, which Oracle wanted.
Oracle can afford to do it, but and Red Hat probably wishes they didn't. Where it will hurt is in big cream puff contracts. Rather than Red Hat getting to charge the list price for a large contract, they face price pressure. Hurts but they'll live.
Oracle's dubious "Unbreakable Linux" might have had some merit if it wasn't for that fact that there's a far cheaper (and some would argue significantly better than UL) clone to RHEL already out there, namely CentOS.
For businesses, there's only 2 sensible choices - ether buy RHEL and get proper support/cerification or get CentOS for free and use the community for suport (or your own in-house expertise). Oracle's Linux is a half-baked mongrel that deserves no-one's time or money, IMHO.
@Richard Lloyd
No company can live with "support from the community"!
How many "would love to be a Hacker" guyz have you seen in the community forums giving answers they don't even understand?
Honest, the amount of threads which contain bs solutions, even if they work, is horrendous!!!
just search for "rm" in the forums and you will see what I mean .... dangerous advice is being given by guyz who don't understand the problem or their cure! The problem is that this bad advice is then available in google and spreading .... don't get me wrong, I love/use linux, but community support? come on!