Ok, the rumours have been thick lately, and it has happened…sorta. They didn’t put out their own distro, but they are now offering support for RedHat Enterprise 3 and 4. I don’t really understand why you’d want to get support from Oracle for your RHEL when it’s still under support (RHEL3 has support until Oct 31, 2010 and RHEL4 until Feb 29, 2012) but according to the Oracle on Linux webpage (well…the PDFs in said webpage…I hate it when companies do that…if you are going to put it online USE HTML!!!) they are going to do some sort of of trade-in support, but I just skimmed through the document.
On the one hand, I like the idea of a second company offering support for a good enterprise distro, but…on the other hand, this is Oracle we are talking about…yes, they know how to do the DB game, but…would you trust them with supporting your OS? I’m not sure I would…specially after they chose such a corny name for their support program…”Oracle Unbreakable Linux”…come on! They don’t even do their own distro!
Anyway, let’s welcome Oracle to the linux game, and let’s hope they do it right.
UPDATE: Well, it seems like I was right in not taking Oracle’s word at face value. PJ, over at Groklaw, posted an article pointing to RedHat’s answer to Oracle’s announcement, as well as some interesting analysis about the whole thing, including Sun’s and HP’s take on it (which she doesn’t like any more than I do). I really recommend reading her post, it has interesting data and even more interesting conclusions.
Technorati Tags: oracle, oracle linux, redhat, hewlett-packard, redhat answers oracle, oracle unbreakable linux, redhat linux, sun microsystems
Tags: Thoughts
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!!
Comments
This entry was posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 1:24 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Looks that Oracle is trying to win via price war.
But in the and when you realize that Red Hat has a lot of time doing his bussiness well is hard to think that oracle will do better just because they decide to enter in the game.
Regards
Not only that…but…think about it this way…the Oracle DB is reliable, yes…can deal with huge amounts of data, yes…but it’s slower than a sleeping elephant, requires more resources than a dozen elephants locked in a room, and is usually an absolutely PITA to get it running *or* to get rid of it and moved to something else…would anybody really want to get stuck with that? In the end, I’m pretty sure it’s cheaper, both in money, time and resources, to run 1,000 mysql or postgressql boxes than 100 oracle boxes…just ask Google.