Red Hat Dismisses Threat Posed by Oracle and MS

Rob writes "Red Hat Inc's executive vice president of worldwide sales, Alex Pinchev, has dismissed the impact that Oracle Corp's entry into the Linux support business could have on Red Hat, insisting Oracle does not really know what it is doing. Pinchev also described Microsoft's recent interoperability and patent peace deal with Novell Inc as a "non-event" and dismissed the suggestion that Linux users are at risk of a patent infringement lawsuit from Redmond."

Red Hat must not be an Oracle shop.

[morgan_greywolf]

"They are delivering no innovation, delayed patches, delayed releases, no real knowledge of open source and no involvement with the community, so where is the value?" he asked.

Oracle's typical answer is that Oracle will only be supported by platforms blessed by Oracle. See this FAQ from Oracle [oracle.com], particular the part on p.4 about the 'Transition Path for Red Hat and Novell customers' In particular, this means that Oracle in the future will probably only be supported on Unbreakable Linux. Have problems? Not running on Unbreakable Linux? You won't get support. It's that simple. Most shops simply cannot afford to run an unsupported configuration, so they will likely migrate their existing SuSE and Red Hat installations to Unbreakable Linux.

Re:Red Hat must not be an Oracle shop.

[BokLM]

Most shops simply cannot afford to run an unsupported configuration, so they will likely migrate their existing SuSE and Red Hat installations to Unbreakable Linux.

Or hopefully they'll migrate instead their existing Oracle installations to MySQL or PostgreSQL or anything that is free software.

Facts, sometimes do not matter

[bogaboga]

Pinchev also described Microsoft's recent interoperability and patent peace deal with Novell Inc as a "non-event" and dismissed the suggestion that Linux users are at risk of a patent infringement lawsuit from Redmond."

While Microsoft's recent interoperability and patent peace deal with Novell Inc might indeed be a "non-event", and Linux users might not be at any risk of a Microsoft lawsuit, these "facts" do not always matter.

What matters is the perception these ramblings create. Do we remember the FUD about Linux Microsoft used to tout in early 2001? It seemed to work. All over a sudden, PHBs feared this Linux phenomenon and some [Linux] deals failed not because of facts but because of this FUD.

There was another piece of FUD when it came to support. Ballmer used to say, "Who do you run to when you need support on Linux? Do you run to RedHat, Novell, the guys at OSDL, IBM? It was all FUD but achieved some success at dissuading folks from using Linux.

The other untruth was one on installation. While software on some Linux distros can be a pain to install, other distros like Freespire, Linspire and Xandros are so easy to have software installed on. But what you hear is the same rant that software on Linux is difficult to manage.

The last untruth:

A good number of people I have spoken to seem to think that Linux, is that particular distro they are experimenting with. So when things do not work out, "Linux" is labeled as a non starter! I can confirm that I know Linux distros that will work out of the box o hardware that Microsoft's Windows has trouble even recognizing.

Re:Problem?

[morgan_greywolf]

Sure. Oracle runs on Solaris, Windows, AIX, and HP-UX, I think. It's just that if you want to run Oracle on Linux, despite Oracle's words to the contrary, I think in the not-so-distant future you will most likely be running it on Unbreakable Linux.

But even if you consider the remote possibility that Oracle might shut off every other platform, even then, you still wouldn't have anti-trust issues. Oracle has nothing near a monopoly in relational database management software. And nothing prevents Microsoft from writing SQL Server for UNIX or Mac OS X or Linux, other than the fact that Microsoft wants companies to use its server platform rather than UNIX, the current market leader.

paranoid /.'s

[Deinesh]

I don't know why everybody is getting so freaked out,

Now Enterprise Linux is cheaper -> GOOD, Linux market gets bigger. IMO RHEL costs too damn much anyway.
Unbreakable Linux becomes the standard linux -> GOOD, I am sick of trying to figure out how creative vendor X is in trying to hide a file from me.

On the other hand, if Red Hat goes under, Linux will loose a huge contributer, but I don't think it will be fatal.

I also doubt that Oracle would be stupid enough to limit support for their DB to Unbreakable linux. Their DB is their bread and butter, if they drop support for any OS that they curently support (say RHEL), there will be customer attrition. Why would they want to do loose Database customers for the sake of a product (Unbreakable Linux) that they will not make as much money on?

Unbreakable linux is a move against Microsoft. MS offers a stable, well integrated platform for their enterprise customers (SQL Server 2005 + Server 2003), Oracle wants to offer something comparable.