[CVALE] Oracle offering to service Red Hat Linux distributions...

[Jason Roysdon]

While the GPL doesn't require any royalties, etc., I really think 
companies like Oracle and Cisco needs to be kicking back some direct 
benefit to RedHat and/or the Linux community and building that 
relationship, not just leaching off of it.

If RedHat goes away, then guess what?  RHEL is unsupported, and that 
means Oracle and Cisco are going to have to do all the support patches 
themselves, which will be basically be a permanent fork of RHEL.

As it stands, this isn't really a traditional fork, as they aren't 
developing further with the base code, just continuing to add their 
products on top of it.

I've very glad to see big players like Oracle and Cisco embracing Linux, 
but I just hope they "get it" and give back.

I'm really happy to see Cisco's CallManager flagship voice product 
switch from being Windows 2000 / SQL 2000 based to RHEL3 (I'm not sure 
of the DB internals).  I was able to install it without a problem as a 
VMWare Guest OS.  It popped up and warned that it had detected VMWare, 
and would be without warranty or support since it isn't from the strict 
supported hardware list (HP DL and IBM models), but if I accepted that I 
could install and move on.

I took a few screenshots of CCM5 if anyone is interested (click on the 
images for full-size): http://jason.roysdon.net/?p=983

Cisco's Unity Express has been Linux on a flash disk based since it came 
out.  I can't wait to see an enterprise scale Unity version running on 
Linux as well (The full-blown Unity currently runs on Win2K/Win2K3 and 
can integrate with Lotus Domino or Exchange 2k/2k3).

-- 
Jason Roysdon
http://jason.roysdon.net/

Dennis Baker wrote:
> First the Peoplesoft takeover now this?  Personally I think the business 
> term is "Bad Neighbor".  I would certainly be a little cautious getting 
> into a business deal with them.
> 
> As an Oracle Administrator I can really see the appeal of this though.  
> I'm not a big fan of the idea of paying for OS support but having a 
> version of Linux that is more or less designed around running Oracle has 
> a lot of appeal.  Additionally for those companies who do want to pay 
> for commercial support it's much easier to deal with just one vendor for 
> OS and Database support.  Less finger pointing in any case. 
> 
> I'm not certain that there is a lot of traction for this outside of 
> existing Oracle customers though.  Red Hat has a reputation and a 
> history with Linux. I gues history will tell.  One thing about this that 
> has me interested is that this news coming shortly after a dissapointing 
> quarter has Redhat's stock in the cellar.  Down to $15/ share from it's 
> recent high of $26 or so... ouch.   I'm thinking it might be a good time 
> to finally take a small stake in a Linux company.
> 
> -- Dennis
> 
> On 10/27/06, *Matt R Hall* <mhall at mhcomputing.net 
> <mailto:mhall at mhcomputing.net>> wrote:
> 
>     On 10/27/06, david burzota <david_burzota at hotmail.com
>     <mailto:david_burzota at hotmail.com>> wrote:
>      >
>      > No thoughts really, just some questions, like:
>      >
>      > Does this mean Oracle is not making enough money on it's database
>     products?
>      > or more generally: Why is Larry Ellison doing this?
> 
>     My personal guess is with OCFS / OCFS2 in the 2.6.x mainline, they are
>     planning on making a big move on clustering. With IBM increasingly
>     focused on the data center and services, and HP focused on blades,
>     this might not be a bad play if they are looking to maintain revenue
>     growth in the long run. Maybe they are trying to generalize as they
>     did when they purchased PeopleSoft. I think the business term is
>     'horizontal consolidation'.
> 
>     Just an idea,
>     Matt
> 
> -- 
> Dennis Da-Ogre http://ogrehut.com
>