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

[Matt R Hall]

On 10/30/06, Dennis Baker <mtbogre at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/30/06, Matt R Hall <mhall at mhcomputing.net> wrote:
> > On 10/30/06, Dennis Baker <mtbogre at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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?

> 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).

I agree my sentence came off sounding a bit more over-reaching than I
meant. It is also true RHL contributed such valuable modules as the
NPTL native POSIX threads support, etc. I did not intend to demean
RH's contributions

> 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.

Probably another reason why life will be hard for Oracle.

> 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.

This probably will make them less expedient than Red Hat and therefore
decrease their value proposition.

> 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.

I am not sure I am so concerned here either. PG and MySQL are a lot
more popular and MySQL for one offers its own well-regarded support
for its product. I do not think all that many of RH's customers are
running Oracle. It's overkill for the vast majority of jobs and there
are other things which are generally faster even if they perhaps have
fewer features.

Even if RH loses some of these customers, they were probably as much
liability as asset because supporting people running complex
proprietary applications developed by third parties is hard and not
always so successful. Speaking of which, that is the same problem
Oracle will be facing trying to support RHEL! All in all, I think
Oracle will have a tough time trying to beat Red Hat at its own game.

Matt