The big news from OpenWorld was that Oracle will be fully supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux — even if you don’t run any Oracle products on it — and doing it for about half of what Red Hat charges.
If you’re Red Hat, that really sucks.
If you aren’t, it sounds like a pretty good deal.
My only question would be: if we want it to be “unbreakable” — why are we basing it on Red Hat? * ducks *
Oracle will also be distributing an “unbranded” RHEL 4 — it’s available here for free download. It’s on 8 CDs (what — no DVD? No torrent?)… the last four being source packages (or so I am inferring — the unzipped version of each of the latter four is includes -src- in the file name, usually a dead giveaway). I just finished downloading it and am burning it now, just to check it out.
Now, there might not be very much to “check out” just yet — it is apparently about the same as RHEL4, but “unbranded” — at least, un-Red Hat branded (whether or not it is “rebranded” for Oracle, I don’t know yet). So, it’s something like CentOS — but from your friendly neighborhood software giant, Oracle.
So, some people are going to be mad at Oracle; for potentially ruining Red Hat, that is. From this BusinessWeek article:
“Red Hat needs a new business model fast…,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group tech consulting firm. “Oracle’s organization is vastly superior. They’ll be providing a better product at a better price. Nobody can say right now whether Red Hat will even be able to survive.”
Unlike Microsoft Corp.’s market-dominating Windows operating system, Raleigh-based Red Hat distributes the open-source Linux system for free. The company makes money by selling service and support.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced Wednesday that his company will offer identical support services for Red Hat’s products — at a roughly 50 percent discount.
“Oracle pretty much took Red Hat’s entire business,” Enderle said. “Of all the companies in software, Oracle’s easily the scariest — they’re just so aggressive.”
On the other hand, that’s business. That’s one of the risks you take when you sell service for a product that can be obtained for free. CentOS (and other clones) already existed, as do other third party companies who will support Red Hat or other linuxes. So, other than the fact that it’s Oracle doing it, there’s nothing “new” here.
Not to beat a dead horse, but what I’d really like to see is support for the desktop. I’m sure it’s there, but I don’t think they are pushing it.
Yet.
