Red Hat haunts Ellison's Linux dream

Glass houses and stones

perhaps Larry should get his own software house to a functional level first. the recent Q&A hosted by Ellison himself, regarding Oracle's Fusion project, indicates that they have trouble dealing with the product line they already have.

if Oracle wants to be better, faster and smarter than RedHat, it would help if the company was at least as effective as RedHat is right now. this does not appear to be the case. Larry's ponderous monster looks like the snake that ate an elephant, and is wondering how to go about digesting the meal.

considering Mr. Ellison's (nonexistent) record of friendly cooperation with external entities, i'd say RH has a sizable advantage - RH has no shortage of players who want to partner with the 800-pound Linux gorilla. quite the congenial ape it is, too, by most accounts.

one would think RH would be paying attention to Ubuntu, not to Larry (he does go on though, doesn't he?). Shuttleworth's creature appears to be a far more effective and agile competitor, a velociraptor to Oracle's brontosaurus.

Loudmouth american opens orifice

Larry,

if you say it often enough someone somewhere may believe you. You think you can throw money at anything and it will all work out right. Doesn't work like that. Oracle products are notoriously bloated. Any merged software deteriorates after takeover.

Cannibalism of friends before predation of others?

Oracle's strategy - especially it's marketting - has been wrong from the start, bordering on the suicidal. They have pushed themselves down the path of being confrontational to RH rather than announcing themselves as just another Linux distro. This means they have set a perception goal that they must take business from RH to prove their success before they can move on to attacking the Windows and UNIX installed base. TBH, this is madness. Most of the decision makers that put in RH (or SuSE, or any other Linux) had to fight long and hard to get senior management to agree to the idea, they had to show that RH could do the job and give the right level of support, and RH (and Novell) spent a lot of time and effort building up relationships with their customers. And Oracle expects those customers to just roll over for an inferior offering just because it's cheaper? I sometimes wonder how Ellison got rich in the first place.

Never used Oracle

I've never used Oracle. I gather you have to pay for it. Paying for software is not something I am in the habit of doing ..... I think I might have paid for a DOS game, once.

If you pay the full price for Oracle, do you get the complete Source Code? Just like you do with Postgres or MySQL, which you *don't* have to pay for? And if you don't get the Source Code, then what's the point of paying for it?

Swinging

He sounds like he's into that

"Not only do we have a lot of customers, we have a lot of partners."

Just make sure you use protection, Larry. You don't want to go spreading those virii around.

I'll collect my fleece and be going then shall I? Taxi!

If you're going to switch from RHEL, it ain't to Oracle...

Oracle's dubious "Unbreakable Linux" might have had some merit if it wasn't for that fact that there's a far cheaper (and some would argue significantly better than UL) clone to RHEL already out there, namely CentOS.

For businesses, there's only 2 sensible choices - ether buy RHEL and get proper support/cerification or get CentOS for free and use the community for suport (or your own in-house expertise). Oracle's Linux is a half-baked mongrel that deserves no-one's time or money, IMHO.

If you're going to switch from RHEL, it ain't to Oracle...

@Richard Lloyd

No company can live with "support from the community"!

How many "would love to be a Hacker" guyz have you seen in the community forums giving answers they don't even understand?

Honest, the amount of threads which contain bs solutions, even if they work, is horrendous!!!

just search for "rm" in the forums and you will see what I mean .... dangerous advice is being given by guyz who don't understand the problem or their cure! The problem is that this bad advice is then available in google and spreading .... don't get me wrong, I love/use linux, but community support? come on!