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Oracle and Red Hat begin battle for the Enterprise

Posted by Hemos on Mon Oct 30, 2006 07:57 AM
from the the-heat-is-on dept.
Databases Oracle Programming Software Businesses Linux Business Red Hat Software IT
Salvance writes "Yahoo News (via ComputerWire) is reporting that Oracle and Red Hat are turning up the heat in the battle over Oracle's new enterprise Linux offering. While Oracle claims they'll be able to offer their 'Unbreakable' version of Red Hat's Linux offering for half the price, Red Hat asserts that all the important security and hardware certifications would be invalidated on Oracle's offering.

At this point, the only thing that's certain is that Red Hat needs to figure out how to keep their large Oracle Enterprise clients on board or risk becoming a takeover target (undoubtably, with Oracle leading the list of potentially bidders)."
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[+] Linux: Microsoft Interested In More Linux Deals 256 comments
eldavojohn writes "Microsoft has announced that it would be open to more deals similar to the one it just made with Novell. 'We will love to put that kind of agreement in place with anyone who distributes Linux software, Red Hat, whoever else,' Steve Ballmer told India's Economic Times. Considering the recent reactions to the Microsoft Novell deal, it would be interesting to see who else takes them up on the offer. Novell is due to receive USD $348 million in up-front payments. Will Red Hat cash out on this offer if it feels the impending pressure from Oracle's Linux? Will non-profit Linux distributions attempt to make deals with Microsoft?"
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  • Man, Cpt Kirk's not going to like that!

  • That's great! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 30 2006, @08:07AM (#16640725)
    And while they are busy pummeling each other Ubuntu will take the lead. As a former alienated Red Hat user I am glad Red Hat is getting some bad karma. Back in the day when Red Hat was free I would regardless go down to CompUSA and buy a copy to support them. Then they came out with this Fedora/Red Hat model where they aren't willing to eat their own dog food. I have installed Fedora numerous times only to be disappointed with the number of bugs in a very obvious unfinished product. I know the latest release of Ubuntu has had its issues, but I haven't gone to it as I have been very pleased with Ubuntu LTS. It is the stable version comparable to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but it is available to all and yes I support it via donations.

    • Re:That's great! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by montyzooooma (853414) on Monday October 30 2006, @08:12AM (#16640757)
      "And while they are busy pummeling each other Ubuntu will take the lead."

      In the enterprise server business? That doesn't seem all that likely...

        • Re:That's great! (Score:4, Informative)

          by lucabrasi999 (585141) on Monday October 30 2006, @08:51AM (#16641059) Journal

          First of all, Sun is no longer a server powerhouse. So, they are a poor example.

          Second of all, you obviously have never worked in a large enterprise. In large enterprises, they pay millions of dollars for critical applications. The last thing a large enterprise would want to depend on is some teenager providing free support on an IRC channel. In addition, if I am running SAP/Oracle or some other critical vendor application, I would only install it on an operating system that is actually supported by the vendor. The last time I checked my present client's PeopleSoft (now Oracle) support policy, Ubuntu was no where to be found. Hell, they only had a few Red Hat options. I doubt I could find more than a handful of enterprise applications that support Ubuntu.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Henry V .009 (518000)
      I've had two Ubuntu installs fubar'ed by bad automatic updates. It's fine for my desktop, but for a server (an RHEL replacement), I'd pick Debian stable any day. Actually I prefer Debian stable over RHEL. I just got through dealing when some major autofs bugs in RHEL 4 -- apparently been there forever -- bind mounts through a program map simply don't work without major hacks.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by jmyers (208878)
      I've been using Red Hat since 1995 with starting with version 2.0. I have used every version since including every Fedora release. I use RHEL4 with a contract for a production system at work. I have never really had a problem with the OS. I cant say that I've ever had an unstable system except when I did major customization and deviated way off the official software versions.

      I have also tried Ubuntu, but I really don't see much difference from Fedora. It just has the mp3 support, etc already installed. Eve

    • I don't think Red Hat's financial model relies much on people who used to buy a set of CDs for their home computer, and Oracle is even less interested in that market. The real money is in selling ES contracts to ISPs with hundreds or thousands of machines, or, especially, AS contracts with big companies.

      As for RHEL/Fedora, I've been running RHEL on all my machines for the last couple of years, recently tried Fedora Core 5, and I'm no wondering why I wouldn't switch to that for most of my office machines (h

      • I don't think Red Hat's financial model relies much on people who used to buy a set of CDs for their home computer, and Oracle is even less interested in that market.

        It's my understanding that the boxed sets were a consisent money loser for Red Hat.

        Given the amount that they invest that benefits ALL distributions I'd rather see Red Hat continue to survive as a profit-making good-player in the community.

        They've done a lot of good by: hiring people that hack the kernel, help to write the Free Java st

    • And while they are busy pummeling each other Ubuntu will take the lead.

      On the server side? are you kidding?

      Back in the day when Red Hat was free I would regardless go down to CompUSA and buy a copy to support them.

      All Rehat did was rebrand their free offering as Fedora so PHB's would not get confused between Red Hat and RHEL.

      Then they came out with this Fedora/Red Hat model where they aren't willing to eat their own dog food.

      Huh? Most of the crap in Fedora ends up in RHEL Ive been through FC 1-6 a

    • Do you run Oracle on Ubuntu? If not then you are not even in this ball game. Red Hat and Oracle are not after home/hobbest users who shop at CompUSA. They are after the use who is willing to pay big $$ for support
  • "...At this point, the only thing that's certain is that Red Hat needs to figure out how to keep their large Oracle Enterprise clients on board or risk becoming a takeover target (undoubtably, with Oracle leading the list of potentially bidders)."

    I know that deep within each of RedHat and Oracle's camp, these two companies agree in this:

    It's all about the money, but in my not so humble opinion, I see RedHat as having an uphill battle on this one.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CastrTroy (595695)
      I think that Oracle is making a bad move here. Instead of partnering with Redhat, to provide a really stable and well working solution, they have chosen to just rape Redhat of all their hard work, brand it as their own, and cut Redhat out of the profits. I think that this may backfire on them. Many users of Redhat use it because it works well with Oracle. However, at this point, if nobody is using Redhat for Oracle, then Redhat may just stop being produced. If it doesn't go that far, we may see Oracle n

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by nuzak (959558)
        > if nobody is using Redhat for Oracle, then Redhat may just stop being produced.

        You think that Oracle wasn't looking for precisely that outcome? Larry Ellison is pissed that Redhat dared move into middleware space by buying JBoss, and now he wants to cut their legs out from under them. It's nothing more or less than a a personal vendetta from Larry Ellison -- this guy makes Steve Ballmer look like Mark Shuttleworth.
        • But then where will Oracle get their Linux from. Right now, they're just kind of taking Redhat, removing all the logos and trademark stuff, ala CentOS, and calling it their own. If Redhat stops producing Linux, or stops producing versions of Redhat that work well with Oracle, then I think Oracle is going to have a very hard time maintain their own distro, since they don't really have any experience with that. I think that Redhat should start to move into the database market by really pushing PostgreSQL an
      • I think that Oracle is making a bad move here. Instead of partnering with Redhat, to provide a really stable and well working solution, they have chosen to just... avail themselves of the GPL license
        • I know the GPL License says you can do this, I'm not saying what they're doing is illegal, I'm saying they have made a bad decision. Now they will have to shoulder the responsibility of creating a quality distro. Redhat was doing a lot of work to make sure they had a quality distro. I'm sure there was also a lot of work being done to make sure Oracle worked correctly (because many people buy Redhat to run Oracle). If nobody is buying Redhat to run oracle, then they certainly don't have any reason to con
        • But if businesses decide that there's savings to be had by moving to an open source database, I don't exactly see how Oracle providing their own version of Linux will stop that. It's not like Oracle will be offering Postgres as a supported option for the database. People will still be saving money by moving to an open source database. I would also like to point out that I never said that what Oracle was doing was illegal, or against the GPL, I simply said it was a bad idea. If Oracle wants to fork they
  • I think some competition will be good for Linux and OSS at this point. Linux distros aren't just a desktop OS, they are an infinitely adaptable and extensible platform, one that I'd like to see taken to new places while these two companies duke it out. I can see this doing good things for enterprise IT, and the general consumer, too. As long as the fight stays in the OSS ring, the best man will win, fighting based on actual merit, without anyone resorting to proprietary licenses, patents, or lawsuits (hopef

    • Linux distros aren't just a desktop OS, they are an infinitely adaptable and extensible platform, one that I'd like to see taken to new places while these two companies duke it out.

      Then again it's not really a fair fight since apparently Oracle's gonna propose much lower prices, flexing its financial muscle to force Red Hat out of the market.

      Methinks that at some point we're going to see court action brought forward by Red Hat against Oracle for using "copyrighted code" à la SCO to ensure their surv

  • See Red Hat's patent policy [redhat.com]. Consider their "promise": Red Hat agrees to refrain from enforcing the infringed patent. It's not a license, it's not irrevocable, it's not even a hard promise: it's just an indication that the present owners of Red Hat probably won't sue you for infringing their patents today.

    So, does anyone think that Oracle will feel bound by this "promise" if they buy Red Hat?

    • Software Patents will be dead and buried within the next 20 years. A change of government in the USA is likely -- and the new government might decide that software patents are anti-competitive, and annul them all in one fell swoop.

      If they ever try to introduce software patents in the EU or UK, where retrospective application of a newly-enacted law is explicitly illegal, every falsely-granted software patent will be null and void -- and the holders will have to reapply for them. Meanwhile, anything that
      • Software Patents will be dead and buried within the next 20 years. A change of government in the USA is likely -- and the new government might decide that software patents are anti-competitive, and annul them all in one fell swoop.

        What color is the sky in your world?

      • A change of government in the USA is likely

        Hmm 5 presidential election cycles, 10 congressional cycles and 3.3 Senate cycles... yea Id say a change in government is pretty likely..

  • Oracle is dreaming (Score:4, Insightful)

    by t482 (193197) on Monday October 30 2006, @08:42AM (#16640979) Homepage
    If they think that their sales people will be worried about $1000 operating systems when they are selling $1 million dollar software packages (Big Iron Oracle @ 50K a CPU or Siebel).

    Nothing will happen - and if you jumped into RH stock you could have made a quick 15% as it over reacted to the news.

    1) Things will go on as normal - RH has more to fear from Ubuntu (teamed up with say IBM or HP)
    2) Oracle will make noise and keep seeing their DB market share be destroyed by MS SQL server (which is cheap and good enough for many applications)
    3) Oracle will go back to hocking APP servers - and making those buying the server buy Oracle DBs.
    4) Redhat will have moderate success selling a beefed up Postgresql
    • >2) Oracle will make noise and keep seeing their DB market share be destroyed by MS SQL server (which is cheap and good enough for many applications)

      Keep...wha...?

      Destroyed? Yes, I'll keep my eye open for a ding in their sales... Not arguing the premise, but it sure hasn't happened yet.

      OTOH, I think you are largely correct about the impact to RH, this was a bit of an overraction by investors.

    • Re:Oracle is dreaming (Score:4, Insightful)

      by burnin1965 (535071) on Monday October 30 2006, @10:19AM (#16642113) Homepage

      1) Things will go on as normal


      Couldn't have said it better myself.

      When Novell purchased SuSE supposedly Red Hat was doomed because Novell was better positioned to bring linux to the enterprise. Red Hat continued to be the leading provider of linux to the enterprise.

      When Sun open sourced Solaris Red Hat was doomed because Sun knows the enterprise and Solaris is a better linux than linux. Red Hat continued to be the leading provider of linux to the enterprise.

      When Sun annouced that they would make Ubuntu linux enterprise ready then linux would finally be ready for the enterprise and Red Hat's end was near. And Red Hat continued to be the leading provider of linux to the enterprise.

      Now Ellison's monsterous ego is lumbering through the market hunting down Red Hat to finally squash it because Oracle has ... lots of money. And guess what will happen, Red Hat will continue to be the leading provider of linux to the enterprise.

      I think the key commonality in all these situations is that we have three closed source proprietary vendors who have been forced into accepting open source, sometimes kicking and screaming, as a significant part of the software stack their businesses rely on, but in the case of Red Hat they are an open source company.

      Oh, and just as a side note for anyone reading this, that article started off with quite the ignorant flaimbait claims. Oracle cannot and will not be removing Red Hat copyrights from linux, they will be removing trademarks. Red Hat has licensed their copyrights on the code under the GPL and those copyrights will remain. And I'm not so sure about the author's claim that Red Hat said there would be hardware incompatibility, I think what they said is any changes to the code in the distribution would invalidate any certifications.

      burnin
  • ..they drop this "Enterprize Linux" idea, and instead focus on a Appliance approach.

    As I pointed before (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=203218&cid=16 621458), Oracle did a very poor job cloning Fedora. And I really doubt that they have enought in-house knowledge to mantain a full fledged Linux distro.

    Also, why on earth they want to offer a full distro anyways? It make a lot more sense to build a minimal distro, and wrap it around OracleDB! Every Oracle install out there already uses a dedicated machine, include a OS with the darned thing, and installation will be incredibly simplified. They should be teaming with RedHat, for support and R&D on this slimmed Linux!

    Hell, even if they don't want to make business with RedHat, at least hire some CentOS developers to put together a decent distro!
    • how about stopping the rampant mental deficiency in decisions they currently have?

      Partner with a Linux distro... Novell or Red hat, announce that this is the only official supported oracle platform and make it work.

      You have an expert company working on the distro, you can focus on your product and compatibility. and everyone wins with minimal expense.

      Are the suits at oracle that stupid they do not see the advantages going that route?
    • Hell, even if they don't want to make business with RedHat, at least hire some CentOS developers to put together a decent distro!

      Are you sure they haven't?

  • It's all spin: Oracle has insignificant control (Score:3, Insightful)

    by postbigbang (761081) on Monday October 30 2006, @09:04AM (#16641179)
    At best, Oracle can start to build their market. To believe the PR spin, you'd think they'd been kernel hackers from say, 1991. In fact, that's not true. While RHEL is competitive, remember that is free-open-source-software, and Oracle makes not a dime from that. Like RH, they'll add services, interesting apps, research, and perhaps a groupie audience with a Fedora-like effort, or that of OpenSUSE.

    If you let Oracle achieve their 'marketshare' from thin air, you're doing injustice to hundreds of thousands of coders that have been evolving the kernel, GNU apps, and lots of interesting and useful apps-- that aren't poised strictly to sell a money maker- in this case the Oracle db.

    Yes, Oracle has a powerful sales machine, even legendary. That Oracle now deigns fit to 'sanctify' Linux is more of a johnny-come-lately move while MySQL and PGRE eat their lunch. They also face enormous obstacles with IBM and its alliance with SUSE-- especially overseas. Don't let the marketing kiddies fool you.

  • They might be in different Market (Score:3, Insightful)

    by HighOrbit (631451) * on Monday October 30 2006, @09:15AM (#16641293)
    If Oracle is going after the general purpose linux server market, then RedHat has a problem. But I think most people would use Oracle Linux as a platform for Oracle DB, not as a general purpose box. In that case, Oracle will only be taking a small portion of RH's market. Usually, an Oracle installation is on a dedicated machine, so I don't expect to see Oracle Linux serving a lot of public webpages or used as a desktop. The only reason I can think of somebody using Oracle Linux for general purpose is if they have a specific policy of limiting the number of OSes to keep support cost down and they already sunk money into Oracle.

    This really hurts Sun, because Solaris is the traditional Oracle platform of choice. Now Linux will be the platform of choice for Oracle. If Oracle makes clustering and failover really easy (as an added value over a simple RH respin), then Sun will take a real beating beause you would be able to replace that good-ol'-solid-and-reliable Sparc monster with a cluster of cheap pre-configured Oracle Linux boxes (instead of buying the next generation of Sun).

    • This really hurts Sun, because Solaris is the traditional Oracle platform of choice. Now Linux will be the platform of choice for Oracle. If Oracle makes clustering and failover really easy (as an added value over a simple RH respin), then Sun will take a real beating beause you would be able to replace that good-ol'-solid-and-reliable Sparc monster with a cluster of cheap pre-configured Oracle Linux boxes (instead of buying the next generation of Sun).

      This begs the question, "Why didn't Oracle choose to de

  • The main reason for choosing Red Hat as a distribution is usually the "security and hardware certificatations". Oracle should either find a way of provinding that or otherwise use some other distribution. Debian would certainly profit very much if chosen for this ;-)
  • I'm not sure I do unless RH is harmed to the point that it no longer can support or develop any code that ISN'T joined at the hip to Oracle applications. See? I really don't care either way unless my RH servers can no longer support anyone else's application because let's face facts - it's unlikely that Oracle will make generalized RH code that is 'best' for Oracle apps and 'best' for everyone else too. In other words isn't this going to result in another RH fork?
  • There are many people reading this who have the skills necessary to work on Linux as an Oracle employee. My question is: would you consider it? I've interviewed a fair number of Oracle employees in the past 6 months and many of them complain that the corporate headquarters in Redwood Shores is no longer a place to innovate. Most software development is now being done in India. The Redwood Shores staff is mostly engaged in integrating technology from the constant stream of acquisitions.
    • Which is depressing really. After Microsoft, Oracle is the top of my list of companies who'll ship any piece of crap to make a buck.
    • You're analysing the future, and as far as I'm aware, the future hasn't happened yet.

      • Anyway - none of this really matters. Proprietary software model is dead anyway, so it really doesn't matter if something like this happens now or a year later. The future is open no matter what. You can fight it as much as you can, but that's the way it's going to be. Better just admit it now and not waste any energy fighting it.

        Yeah. Proprietary software is dead! Along with incandescent lightbulbs, the English system, walking, and fossil fuels!

        Oh, wait...

    • "but without undertaking any of the major development tasks (only do bugfixes)."

      The value of the support is directly related to the level of development. As a customer, once you are hit by a bug, you'd presumably want to get it fixed, and the closer to the development the support provider is, the better they will be at fixing the bugs.

      Would you pay Oracle for a support contract, only to find out they're not going to fix your bugs, they'll wait until the upstream does it? Or that they'll fix them bug, but th

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by RAMMS+EIN (578166)
      ``It has always seemed relatively obvious to me that most OSS software companies are vulnerable to this type of attack mounted by a large proprietary software vendor. Take the software (which, at the end of the day is where the real value is),''

      I'm not so sure the real value is in the software. People and, especially, companies seem to be willing to pay more for support contracts than for software. They'll even take inferior software over superior software if they can get a support contract that way.

      ``and o
        • And yet, you are one of the very few in the porn industry running Windows. So, obviously superior software does not matter to you. Your religion does.
    • And pretty soon, if the rumours of Open Source Java are to be believed, you may well have a native Java build which won't depend on Linux binary emulation (which has got to be slowing things down; there are no two ways about it). Interesting Times.
      • Linux binary emulation doesn't slow anything down. FreeBSD itself goes through the very same syscall translation layer; the Linux layer simply uses a different syscall map. It sucks up resources though, since it does of course have to load a different set of userland libraries, another libc, all the X client libs for gui apps, etc.

        And FreeBSD has had a native java port for a while: http://www.freebsd.org/java/ [freebsd.org]
    • Yes, it would. I'm sure that thought will keep Red Hat's former employees warm at night after the company goes bankrupt.
    • You can not buy Ubuntu. How can you compete with that?

      Simple you apply this criterium to your servers: They must be supported, they must have enterprise level applications certified to run on them...

    • Hmmm. He has a superior DB that has controlled the upper end of DBs (but a company out there is trying hard to use their monopoly to push an inferior DB; In addition, Oracle is under pressure from DB2 and OSS Dbs). He does not have a monopoly on the business software (Again a company with a monopoly is trying to weasil its way there; but the real competition is a german company who uses Oracle DB).

      Ellison does not have a monopoly. Now he is trying to expand into Linux. I say fine. Redhat has it right. The

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