Oracle cranks Red Hat Linux clone to 6.1 If you needed a demonstration that Oracle is not CentOS, then look no further than the fact that only two weeks after Red Hat announced its Enterprise Linux 6.1 update, software giant Oracle has kicked out its Linux 6.1 clone. This is despite Red Hat's attempts to slow down the RHEL cloners and others – such as Oracle and the …
"Oracle strongly recommends that customers start with a fresh install of Oracle Linux 6.1 if they are jumping from a prior major version of Ellison's Linux to this one, even though the Anaconda installer will technically support an upgrade"
... ahh. The joys of a forced upgrade. Picture Oracle customers calling tech support and being asked "have you installed from scratch or upgraded?" If the answer is "upgraded" then I'm already hearing the voices "please install a fresh OS and call back again."
Now, Oracle, are you serious? Just because you've stopped copying directly from RH is not a good reason to force a reinstall on your beloved customers.
Sysadmins that are right now feeling pissed off as they convinced their managers to go with Oracle instead of RH, if only because the support was going to be easier since everything was coming from the same place. Now their bosses are hearing that Oracle is recommending an expensive fresh install. Perhaps it's time to explain to the PHB what Oracle was selling as "Unbreakable Linux" and what is selling now.
No problem, I'm sure that Oracle has a few Sun servers ready to sell. Now, instead of a fresh install, why not upgrade your aged hardware with something whose support comes truly from the same place?
I cannot believe that this is actually a sales tactic.
If you're paying attention you know that Red Hat's tactics are targeted at making it harder for Oracle to support.
I'm pretty sure nobody at Red Hat cares, per se, about Oracle cloning RHEL; any more than they care about CentOS or Scientific Linux cloning RHEL. But who is really at Oracle that can support their clone?
Well, I'd love to see the amount of QA they've done in that time.
given the state of their 6.0 (oracle's that is) compared to RHEL then it is certainly not unbreakable.
Out Video rendering rig is a 6core AMD overclocked to 4.8Ghz and watercooled.
RHEL with its stock kernel runs great
Unbrealable Linux? Ae you having a larf? Halfway through our first render is fell over.
We only use it coz we are an Oracle DB shop. My boss has signed off for a proper RHEL License.
As most of our DB's run on HP-UX (itanium) we are also pretty pissed off at Oracle at the moment. The IBM salesguy is making all the right noises at the moment.
I am sure that the "Unbreakable Kernel" was fully tested on Oracle applications, but if you are running the "Unbreakable Kernel" with anything else, you are asking for trouble. Oracle fully supports the RH Standard Kernel, which would probably run fine with your "Rendering Rig". You actually have a license for Oracle Linux and you went out and bought ANOTHER license for RH when you could use the same kernel with your existing license?!?! You should be fired or go back to Windows support.
how "open" CLOSED software is becoming
http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/
http://www.oracle.com/us/opensource/
http://www.ibm.com/opensource
http://www.apple.com/opensource/
http://code.google.com/opensource/
http://opensource.nokia.com
http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/599999-0-0-0-121.html (LOL @ crappy HP websites)
... or actually open in some cases. Yeah you wouldn't have guessed in 1995.
While most of the non-Linux packages will be unchanged apart from rebranding, Oracle have done a lot of work on the kernel primarily, as has been written above, to make Oracle database and application software work better.
At the moment this is a simple fork. In time, of course, merging their changes and the linux.org ones will become an interesting knife and fork task. Whether they have been able to allocate some of the Solaris kernel developers to work on Unbreakable Linux, or whether the skills aren't transferable I would be interested to learn.
"properly getting to know a brand new kernel would take them *some* time."
All the more reason for vendors developing and distributing variants to work hard enough to get their patches accepted upstream to become part of the mainstream kernel and then maintain them there. If they don't they are condemned to repeat the process of learning new kernels to apply the patch against every time the maintained target goes stale, a bit like trying to synchronise 2 spacecraft in different orbits. Doable, but expensive compared to planning the orbits so they synchronise in the first place. I suspect helping hardware manufacturers and others redesign internal engineering processes to achieve this is where specialists like Red Hat earn a growing share of their revenue these days.
Meanwhile Oracle _still_ hasn't announced support for any of its software on RHEL6 – to my mind nearly as anti-competitive as what they just did to HP. IBM had better watch out, because surely the AIX ports are also in Oracle’s sights (and sorry I don’t buy the IBM line of “we have a database already called DB2 – our customers will use that if Oracle pulls support”).
Seriously folks a lot of people need to wake up and see what Larry is doing here – if you aren’t using a completely closed Oracle stack (together with the outrageous support costs, poor support, terrible sales processes etc.), then you will be struggling to run any Oracle software in the next few years. The answer is to get Oracle software out of your IT systems – easier said than done I know, but the alternative is frightening – may as well give Uncle Larry all your company’s stock right now
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