IBM Refuses To Certify Oracle Linux 124
Andrew writes "IBM has thrown a spanner in the Oracle Linux works by refusing to certify that IBM's software portfolio will run and be supported on Oracle Unbreakable Linux. If IBM applications turn out to be incompatible with Oracle Linux, then it will be up to Oracle to resolve any issues. This conservative stance of IBM's is unlikely to help Oracle sell Linux subscriptions to businesses that use any of IBM's large software portfolio."
CentOS too (Score:4, Interesting)
If Oracle Linux is from the same mold as CentOS then it is a fear factor rather than anything serious. Personally if I where Oracle I would hire as many of the CentOS developers as possible and get them to do a spin of CentOS as Oracle Linux.
Re:A definite shame (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:CentOS too (Score:3, Interesting)
In my experience, "support" is pretty much a misnomer.
What happens basically 100% of the time is that they blame anything and everything besides their product. The only way around this is if you buy all of your stuff from one company and have one support contract for all of that stuff.
Example, I had a certified and partnered RAID array, HBA card, OS, and system hardware that were all OK with each other. When I had a problem, every one of the hardware people said, "If the lights are on, then it works according to me, having it work with your environment is your problem". At home, I have a piece of hardware where the driver breaks _EVERY TIME_ I do an OS update, so they taught me not to do OS updates. They do update their driver within a period of time, but if I call them or if I go to their website, they never say "This driver does not work after upgrading to OS x.y". I've gotten hot and bothered about it, but I've just given up. One time, they came out with an update within a few days of me calling and asking about it, yet the asshat on the phone could not say "We are working on it, its a known issue".
It kills me the amount of money that "support" costs, and management and all of that love support for some reason, but I've found more real support from online forums, mailinglists, and newsgroups for free software than I have for any paid for support for "real" products.
Oh, while I'm on a rant here. What about the support answer to the request of: "I need your product to support feature X". And the answer is, pay us more money for the latest version of our product, drop all of your production work you are doing, have a downtime, and then _if_ it works, and _if_ its bugfree and works 100% as advertised, then you will now have feature X. I'm sorry that is not support, that is buying a new product, which could very well be from another vendor.
Support is mostly an illusion.
Re:CentOS too (Score:3, Interesting)
If you look at Novell SLES 9 and RHEL 4 you will see that they're still running on (a heavily patched up) 2.6.7 and 2.6.9 version of the kernel.
Free distro's usually update their packages very frequently which is a good thing, except in an enterprise environment. Also, 2 years later there will be absolutely no support for anymore for those verions. SLES and RHEL versions on the other hand are supported for at least 5 years.
The point is that they only patch (security) bugs and nothing else, so the entire system is essentially frozen for years, hardly any new features are added.
Also, there is absolutely no point in checking out Oracle's Linux until they've been around for a couple of years and have a proven track record. Who says they won't change their mind in 2 year about the entire thing and all effort will be lost.
Also, while CentOS practically is basically just RHEL, it can certainly cause support issues. I've installed arcserve backup on CentOS and it didn't recognize the distro because of the name change and I had to manually alter the install script. I can very well imagine a lot of companies don't want to gamble on this possibility.