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

[Dennis Baker]

On 10/30/06, Matt R Hall <mhall at mhcomputing.net> wrote:
>
> On 10/30/06, Dennis Baker <mtbogre at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The big think I see about Oracle's move that stinks is that they are not
> > creating their own distro or even forking an existing distro like
> Mandrake
> > did.  They are simply going directly after Redhat's cutomers and
> competing
> > on straight price.  That's what I think is crap about the deal.
>
> Good points. Some questions that follow:
>
> This does not seem to take into account that Oracle appears to have
> begun contributing to the Linux kernel itself. Notably, Oracle seems
> to be including more features more quickly than Red Hat. OCFS and
> OCFS2 are available in the kernel while RedHat GFS is still delayed.
> Do Oracle's contributions have any effect on the ethical legitimacy of
> their business proposal?


Am I the only one who is simply amazed at how many file systems Linux has?
We don't have one software RAID solution we have 2 (or is it three? or have
they merged back down to one?)  ext3, reiser, jfs, xfs,  Reiser 4 (although
it will probably never be merged since Reiser is in prison) then OCFS,
GFS....  the list goes on.  Oops... I diverge.

I guess it's a matter of debate.  I've heard about Oracle's OCFS and OCFS2
and both products are great but Oracle benefits directly from every
enhancement they put into the Linux kernel.  If you are implying that Oracle
has contributed more to the Linux kernel than Redhat than I think you are
way off base.  Even if you were just to confine the discussion to the kernel
alone I think RedHat it's pretty clear that RedHat contributes a lot more.
That's not even mentioning all of the other projects which RedHat actively
contributes to (Gnome being one big one I can think of).

Maybe it's not even an ethical issue.  Look at it from another perspective.
If you are paying for support from RedHat you are paying support to the
company that steers the course of RedHat Linux.  Problems you encounter and
issue you bring up with RedHat could directly affect the next version of
RHEL.  If you are paying support to Oracle ...  the next version of Oracle's
Linux will based on RHEL which will be influenced by the people who pay for
RedHat support.

Why does Red Hat support seem to cost more than Sun Solaris 10 support
> and SuSE support? Perhaps Oracle's point is that Red Hat simply
> charges too much. If you are charging more than a proprietary UNIX
> vendor for open source support, that is a bit worrisome.


I don't pay for OS support so I can't comment on Support  Pricing.

However, there is a relevant metric for which I have no measurements:
> support quality. I doubt Oracle's will match any of these other
> vendors for a long time. I recall the  quality support of their
> database products when they were corrupting large tables of valuable
> data at my last job. We even had a test case Oracle admitted
> reproduced the bug. But they still did not fix it for a very long
> time.


I can't really comment on this either.  We have dealt with Oracle's support
and in general have been happy with what we got.  But I would think since
RedHat's support staff would have a more direct channel to the people who
develop and support the distribution.  Oracle will have to essentially
develop shadow experts on many aspects of RedHat Linux.

>
> Lastly, how much is in a name? Red Hat has a lot of brand loyalty that
> I think could be hard for Oracle to match. In particular Oracle does
> not seem to be especially well regarded in the channel, which is not
> surprising considering the behavior of its leaders. Companies with
> this problem often find life is a little more complicated without a
> good channel than they thought it would be, particularly because I
> suspect people who need Linux support are going to be receiving some
> of it from integrators who will not gladly recommend Oracle support
> contracts. My take on this issue is, in the Linux space, you would not
> get fired for using Red Hat, but it would be easy to get fired for
> using Oracle.


I don't know about name value in the Linux space.  I do know that Oracle is
a powerful name and especially if you were deploying Oracle on top of Linux
the choice to go with Oracle would probably not be questioned.  If you are
deploying a web server or a MySQL DB server I'm not so sure Oracle would be
at the top of the list for support vendors.

-- Dennis



Matt
>
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-- 
Dennis Da-Ogre http://ogrehut.com
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