Oracle to Offer RedHat Support? 223
rs232 writes to tell us ITP is reporting that Oracle's Larry Ellison recently called Red Hat's ability to honor their support contracts effectively into question. Taking that claim one step further, Ellison claims that Oracle will soon start offering support for Red Hat Linux users. From the article: "The reason for this move, which Oracle executives later declined to provide any real detail on, is that Red Hat isn't doing a good enough job of providing that support itself, Ellison said. 'Red Hat is too small and does not do a very good job of supporting them [customers],' he said."
Interesting turn of events (Score:4, Interesting)
This is great news for Redhat (Score:5, Interesting)
Oracle says they plan to support Redhat. Not SUSE. Not some Oracle distro. So that right there is a stamp of approval on the entire Redhat "platform" if you will. Now there will be less fear that Oracle might make another distro its favorite soon- they would not hire a bunch of people to support Redhat if they planned to move to SUSE next month. Also this gives the Redhat+Oracle platform something you can't get with Solaris+Oracle or Windows+Oracle- a one stop shop for support. Redhat will be the ONLY OS that Oracle can completely provide support for. That means as of now Redhat is the best platform for Oracle. Period.
Oracle plans to support Redhat. Not CentOS or Fedora or some other free Redhat. That means if someone wants a solution for Oracle supported Redhat they still have to BUY Redhat's OS from the company. There might be some people (in fact I know one for sure) that might be holding out on switching to a Redhat Oracle solution (from a Solaris or Windows one) because they want support from a company far bigger than Redhat (like Sun and MS are). Now they have that. Plus I would not be surprised if many companies (do to ignorance, comfort, whatever) double dip- buy both Redhat and Oracle Redhat support. This can only grow Redhat's marketshare!
Its a win-win for Redhat- there platform becomes more stable and accepted, they will maybe get more people to buy their OS (that would prefer Oracle support compared to support from an OS vender like Microsoft or Redhat) and they get tons of free press.
I would be mad if I was at Novell or Sun today.
Re:Interesting turn of events (Score:2, Interesting)
Regards,
Steve
I am sure people at Redhat are happy with that (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Read the source link! (Score:2)
2) It could be taken either way. If Red Hat is growing but not investing enough in their support infrastructure to support that growth, then Red Hat IS doing good simply because they are growing. However, if they are cutting their infrastructure and not growing, then they are just being pricks.
But yeah, unless this is coming f
MySQL? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:MySQL? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:MySQL? (Score:2)
Re:MySQL? (Score:2)
Because not every data storage need requires a big RDBMS.
Re:MySQL? (Score:2)
Maybe you want a good db that most applications have nice integration for?
Re:MySQL? (Score:2)
especially if it is a combination of a centralized oracle database and a group of smaller decentralized MySQL databases which would be too expensive to license Oracle for each instance
for example a hotel chain which does local room management and reservations on a custom mad
Re:MySQL? (Score:2)
Re:MySQL? (Score:2)
To put it another way, Oracle wants to see its Linux business grow, but recognizes that support is a significant pain point for its install base: If you want something done right...
Well could be worse for red hat (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Well could be worse for red hat (Score:4, Informative)
About a year and a half ago we had a problem with nss_ldap. After waiting months for them to fix the problem, we looked through the source code, spotted and fixed the problem, and sent them the fix. After doing so we had to wait two more months for them to provide us with a supported hotfix. The package *still* isn't included in the RHEL4 disto.
We had the same problem with RHEL3, but we hadn't actually run into it until recently. Not suprisingly, we were denied support for RHEL3 because it was going into maintanence mode two weeks after we notified them we were having the same problem with RHEL3.
This is just *one* of the numerous support problems we've had. I could probably give three or four more example just like this one and we've only had Redhat support for 3 years...
Re:Well could be worse for red hat (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder if Ellison understands the industry or just makes stuff up as he goes along. CIO Insight Magazine [cioinsight.com] named Red Hat #1 for offering value to its customers two years in a row. Oracle doesn't even seem to appear in the top 10.
It'll be interesting to see how the market responds to such an offer.
Re:Well could be worse for red hat (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well could be worse for red hat (Score:2)
Re:Well could be worse for red hat (Score:2)
Re:Well could be worse for red hat (Score:2)
What, pray tell, requires all this recompiling of kernels on a modern Linux distro?
Re:Well could be worse for red hat (Score:2)
I wonder... Orcale distro on the way? (Score:5, Insightful)
Either that or will Oracle end up buying RH?
Re:I wonder... Orcale distro on the way? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, Oracle will get into the OS biz. Here's why. (Score:4, Interesting)
So the real question is indeed, as already noted in this thread, will Oracle code, package, and support a particular Linux distro? I think it has to go that way. Here are two reasons why.
1. Enterprises use huge application-oriented technology stacks -- hardware, OS, DBMS, app server, OLTP apps, analytics, etc., etc. They increasingly resist paying "value prices" for all those layers. Thus, each vendor wants ITS tiers to be value-priced, while the other layers are commoditized, both to free up money for that vendor, and to generally undermine the other big companies. Sun likes giving away DBMS. SAP is pushing cheap DBMS. Microsoft introduced low-cost DBMS. And so Oracle needs to strike back by, for example, ensuring that the OS gets commoditized.
2. Oracle code is what Scott McNealy would call "a big hairball". Customers need to be protected from the complexity. Integrating the DBMS and OS is a potential way to do that.
Re:Yes, Oracle will get into the OS biz. Here's wh (Score:2)
What a fscking disaster that would be. As bad a MSFT integreating IE into Windows.
Re:Yes, Oracle will get into the OS biz. Here's wh (Score:2)
I'm not really sure how much deeper it's likely to get.
Re:Yes, Oracle will get into the OS biz. Here's wh (Score:2)
You mentioned it: run it kernel space. Or rely on system calls only available to Linux.
Sure, Oracle wrote OCFS* (from knowledge they gained by purchasing DEC Rdb), but that does not mean that OCFS* can only be used by Oracle. It's a filesystem "just" like any other FS, in that
Re:Yes, Oracle will get into the OS biz. Here's wh (Score:2)
Actually it wasn't DEC Rdb they got it from, it was the DLM (Distributed Lock Manager) code from Tru64 Alpha's TruCluster that some twit in Compaq sold them. Sometime round 1998 if I remember right. I worked for Compaq in the (ex-DEC) UK Unix Support Group at the time and remember being horrified when I found out. At the time Oracle relied heavily on the DLM + CFS (Cluster File System) in Tru64 Unix to be able to run multiple database instances for a single database on different systems (Oracle Parallel
Re:Yes, Oracle will get into the OS biz. Here's wh (Score:2)
Ah, you're right, I forgot all about that.
But wasn't TruCluster a reimplimentation of the VAXcluster layered product?
My worst fear was that they would take the DLM, built their own platform neutral CFS implementation, and Tru64's DLM + CFS would become irrelevant.
When a product like VAXclusters and DLM have been
Re:Yes, Oracle will get into the OS biz. Here's wh (Score:2)
Yep. Though its not quite as good as the cluster filesystem on OpenVMS. Any cluster member can read files (of 64k or larger) direct from shared storage, but asynchronous writes are still funneled over the cluster interconnect to an AdvFS domain server. So its important for optimum performance (and to avoid flooding the Memory Channel interconnect) to align the server for a particular AdvFS domain with the cluster member doing t
Re:Yes, Oracle will get into the OS biz. Here's wh (Score:2)
This could turn the industry on its head (Score:2)
I think Oracle have to tread very carefully here. If they were to take a Linux distribution like Ubuntu or Debian (saves them having to buy a Linux vendor) strip it down and integrate it with their own software and sell it, then this would be a direct attack on the likes of Sun, IBM, HP, etc. Why would anyone need Solaris
Re:Yes, and ORCL has been on both sides of the fen (Score:2)
Mostly this concerns me from a personal point of view. I would call myself an "integrator", in so far as what I do is work very closely with HP and HP resellers in pre-sales, delivery, installation and integration of the solution with the customers existing environments. In my experience the customers approach (or are approached by) HP or their Resellers directly, and where Oracle is involved (80% of the time) their sphere of influence extends to the DB implementation and related business, with only some
Re:I wonder... Orcale distro on the way? (Score:2)
Oracle thinks Redhat Support is poor? (Score:5, Interesting)
Small potatoes (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Small potatoes (Score:3, Informative)
It doesn't really say anything about it, [ibm.com] why?
Re:Small potatoes (Score:4, Insightful)
Quote from IBM's site:
Will the future of commercial Linux (i.e. the only one that counts) be that everyone has to support Linux in-house? Looking at the state of things today: more and more big corporations need to offer support for Linux themselves, instead of relying on what are supposed to be "Linux vendors". I'm not sure is this a good or bad thing, but it could lead to cutting out the middle man (e.g. RedHat) out of the loop and out of the market (thus costing geeks jobs, leading to more fragmentation, etc. etc.).
It's different than with other commercial systems for sure: nobody expects they'd have to provide their own support for MS Windows or Solaris - it's supposed to "just work" and if something brakes, call Microsoft or Sun to fix it.
One other thing: it could lead to a situation where there's a "Linux for everything" - in the sense that, if you want the best for your Oracle database, use this distribution, if you need it for SAP, use that one, etc. It's hard to predict how it will end, but it doesn't seem good.
Re:Small potatoes (Score:2)
Re:Small potatoes (Score:2)
Good point.
Are IBM's RHEL techs certified by RedHat or IBM? If it's by RedHat, then RedHat still has some business/revenue from it...
Re:Small potatoes (Score:2)
There isn't - but please tell me how that has any impact on IBM being a Linux vendor.
IBM is also a Windows vendor - but there's no "IBM Windows".
In fact there are thousands of Windows vendors. [microsoft.com] Are you implying that each one of them has their own Windows distribution?
Re:Small potatoes (Score:2)
Arguably, Novell is doing this now. Yes, you can buy "just SUSE", but it also comes sliced and diced and bundled as a component of other things. Open Enterprise Server; Groupwise with bundled OS license; Novell Linux Desktop: coporate polished, with bundled ZENWorks licenses, etc.
Re:Small potatoes (Score:2)
Good! (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's the rumor I've heard: (Can't name the source, sorry.)
If a single mega-company were to migrate to Linux and rely on Red Hat for support, it would completely consume all of Red Hat's support resources, and then some. The rumor goes that this is one of the main problems with large companies that want to move to Linux: the support capacity simply isn't there.
So, the reasoning goes, Red Hat is actually glad when projects like CentOS [centos.org] and Oracle support [itp.net] take off: Red Hat knows that it can't support everybody, it knows that it needs for it's platform to "win," it knows that there is incredible value in winning alone, and so: These developments are all good for Red Hat.
After a little research, I find this article [com.com] that supports what I've heard.
A lot of us are thinking about these things in terms of home users. We don't give a damn for support- we just fix it ourselves, service it ourselves. It's part of owning a computer. But in the business, I understand they think about things differently: Support becomes a primary thing. It's not optional, even when you have internal IT people on staff.
Re:Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Good! (Score:2)
Microsoft did this about 15 years ago (ish) in the UK. I was working at DEC's UK Customer support center at the time and MS outsourced much of their support to DEC because they just didn't have enough skilled people in-house to cover all the support calls they were getting.
Re:Good! (Score:2)
Re:Good! (Score:2)
Apart from that, there's the logistics of the thing (HR are going to be *busy* churning out contracts, following up referen
Re:Good! (Score:2)
Re:Good! (Score:3, Insightful)
After all, who would WANT to support an "operating system" that may contain a near-infinite number of pieces depending on who you ask?
This is a nasty Linux problem, not just a Red Hat issue: Lacking a clear and working definition of where the OS ends and where the 3rd-party stuff begins makes "Linux" much less supportable as a product.
Re:Good! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Good! (Score:2)
I understand, but that is too much software to be handled as a single product IMO.
Re:Good! (Score:2)
Yeah, I encouraged a client to buy RHE when we upgraded the machine from Redhat Linux 9 to Redhat Enterprise 3. It was a standard Dell PowerEdge 2??? with a pair of firewire drives hanging off it for backup.
After install, the backup disks were gone. Call to Redhat - "we don't support firewire." So, off to an 'unsupported' kernel, Redhat won't talk to us about the machine, we found some community scripts which made it work well enough, and basica
Re:Good! (Score:2)
I think his point is that they say they have it working, it didn't work for him, they couldn't suggest a workaround although one was available (by Linux standards of "available") and didn't seem sympathetic.
I don't think it's a big deal, but it seems like at least a legitimate complaint.
Re:Good! (Score:2)
Does it work with standard proxies with open specs/source? Yes.
Does it work with a hacked together proxy with unpredictable behaviour that doesn't adhere to standards? No.
Have done some hacks to get it partially working? Yes, but it doesn't always work because MS won't work with us to help us identify the problem and they're specs aren't open so we can't exactly know what we're dealing with.
That's not a gray area. That's clearly black and white.
What do you expect th
Re:Good! (Score:2)
When entering into a support agreement for a product, it's reasonable to expect all features to be supported unless specifically and clearing excepted; it doesn't sound like that was the case in this instance.
I have to agree... (Score:5, Interesting)
A significant part of my job is Linux sysadmin work, using licensed Red Hat Enterprise products. The tools are (for the most part) useful, reliable, and complete. The problem is, the enterprise distros are severely lacking in their packages and features.
Recently, while building a distributed mail system (multiple servers in the mail chain, multidomain support and virtual mailboxes) on RHEL4,
The recommended version for mail and database servers (Enterprise Server) does indeed have packages for Postfix (our preferred mail app) and MySQL available, but none of the Postfix packages have MySQL support enabled (Postfix has good MySQL support, including DB connection caching through a proxy interface). This effectively meant that none of the dozens of excellent mail administration tools out there would be available to us, and we couldn't put together a mail system that didn't rely on flat files in some fashion or another, without setting up parallel services (LDAP) solely to support mail services.
I built the server once on Red Hat ES and when all was said and done, I ended up with seven major components having to be compiled either from source, or rebuilt RPMs with modified spec files and/or compile flags. This doesn't bother me, except for the fact that the whole reason my employer pays thousands upon thousands of dollars for an enterprise Linux was so that we could stick to standard packages, so that if a particular machine has issues, we don't have to rely on one person to know what's going on.
I can't imagine we're the only paying client Red Hat has that wants to run a mail server that relies on a database server. It wouldn't chagrin me to change mail server or database packages (I've used most of the common ones), but looking deeper just led me to the realization that no matter which packages or paths I took, I'd still be stuck with the same issues.
Until Red Hat gains better flexibility, timeliness, and awareness of their client needs, perhaps Ellison is on the ball with his visions of supporting the clients directly. I'm guessing he won't be supporting MySQL, though. And after rebuilding the server on Debian stable, with all features we desired being available in the core distro, we're happier.
And I'm the only guy here who groks Debian well enough to run it, sigh.
Re:I have to agree... (Score:2)
That is why we should not expect our OS vendor to supply, configure and debug
Re:I have to agree... (Score:2)
And that kernelpanicked guy
Re:I have to agree... (Score:2)
It's a problem for RedHat: they're big enough to be a lawsuit target if t
Re:I have to agree... (Score:4, Insightful)
The nature of my work (as is the case with most of us, I'd guess) is that there are always new services and systems needing to be built (or rebuilt, as they age) while existing services rarely get mothballed, and so even a modicum of building packages easily snowballs over time into an all-consuming task. The less time I have to spend looking backwards, the more I can keep us moving forward.
It boils down to time. If maintaining that single mail system was my only job, I'd be on easy street, but at best that systems encompasses but a sliver of my job responsibilities. I prefer to avoid spending hours each week building and pushing custom packages to servers, if I can implement a solution which is more hands-off.
The big selling point of enterprise systems for large organizations is the centralized management and administration tools, which often become useless when you aren't using prebuilt packages from the vendor.
The other problem here is that every environment is different, and the environment a server works in can significantly change the requirements, as well as the time investment, for installing and maintaining.
While I'm very experienced with Linux and very at-ease in most *nix environments, I'm not a one-person shop, and while I can build and maintain complex, custom systems doesn't mean the guy who's running that server six months from now has my skill set. Part of being a good administrator is making the job easy for whoever gets called to fix a server when you're on vacation, or after you leave.
Regards-
Re:I have to agree... (Score:2)
Apparently your company hasn't started outsourcing
Configuration Management (Score:2)
I agree, managing multiple boxes is where the money gets charged, because that is (historically) something that only enterprises wanted to do -and it is where all enterprise-grade distros ask for money. Now that anyone with Xen or VMWare player can have a heterogenous cluster of linux distros on their laptop, everyone needs distributed cluster admin.
Novell's red carpet stuff [novell.com] is free (well, "evaluation" free) for two systems. Since I cannot get the update client that shipped with SuSE10.1 to work proper
Re:I have to agree... (Score:2)
Show us the server where Oracle 10.2 debs are, and I'll put instantly put it in my sources.list file. (No, Oracle XE does not count.)
Not this shit again... (Score:2)
RPM is hardly legacy. It's pretty damn feature-complete. Care to explain what the issue with it is?
Re:I have to agree... (Score:2)
Too small? (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me count the ways:
I'd venture to guess more than 3/4 of its technical staff is dedicated to writing useless bug-ridden java guis (each requiring differing versions of java) with absolutely no interoperability between them. None of them can be scripted and they're all pieces of shit.
And let's not start with sqlplus. You think they could just hire one guy who may be able to put some readline support in there so it could get with the times.
Another good example is security. How many employees does oracle have dedicated to their security team? I'd venture to guess they have one monkey. Not even a person. Do I need to bring up the unpatched vulnerabilities that are hundreds of days old?
Now how about bug fixing? Anyone ever upgrade a production Oracle instance? No? You know why? Because you fucking can't. You have to wait until the latest patch has at least 1 year of testing because upgrades, even minor bug fixes, break in spectacular ways. So, because noone installs them, there's never any testing.
Re:Too small? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Too small? (Score:2)
Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm pretty sure this guy doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. Since RedHat soesn't change software versions after a release, but instead backports security and bugfixes to the released version, what older versions is he referring to?
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
Sadly it is true - Red Hat support does suck (Score:4, Informative)
I have talked to our developers and Product Management the last days and unfortunately we currently couldn't allocate enough developer ressources to get this issue fixed.
I will try to check when the currently estimated time for this fix is. -- Response of 18 Jan to support query filed 4 Aug 2005, still no engineer assigned...
On average we get a 6 month delay before the report reaches an engineer, and when it does the first thing we get asked is if the problem is still occurring (read fixed this yourselves yet?). Don't get me wrong. I love Red Hat and the work it does. We took on RHEL V4 instead of FC for the core services of our company, primarily for the support aspect. Out of the several support requests filed we only have had prompt decent support for one of them - and that was only because their web support had gone down and they were taking phone support. It really makes me wonder what the benefit of RHEL is over FC if support is near non-existant. Or is some big corporate with RHEL rolled out across all its servers consuming all of Red Hat's support staff, denying the small fries any look in to support?
No wonder Oracle are looking to move in
And that is different from anyone else - how? (Score:3, Informative)
The problem? To big a target. (Score:2)
It encompasses about 4 times as much stuff as you'd see in a Solaris install, and it supports a much wider range of hardware.
Red Hat should change their support contract structure.
Tier 1: Security updates and access to beta patches
Tier 2: Customer support for the following packages:
* The Kernel (hardware/stability issues)
* Bugs in RH-written tools (Anaconda, Kudzu, system-config-*, rhgb, etc.)
* Bugs in RH-modified packages relating to basic system services (first
Re:Sadly it is true - Red Hat support does suck (Score:2)
Um... Use FC in a production environment?
FC is designed to be cutting edge. If you want security you're going to have to upgrade often. Upgrading your kernel obviously means down time. Fedora kernels are riskier. Regressions can mean Mega Downtime.
Sometimes the regressions are huge. For example, one kernel upgrade in FC4 made most SMP systems unbootable. Sometimes the bugs are subtle. Stoc
How much does this suck for Novell??? (Score:5, Interesting)
The big question here is, in my opinion, what does this say about Novell and Oracle in the enterprise? It could be argued that Oracle had already invested so much time and effort into nuturing their product line on Red Hat that a move to SUSE would be cumbersome. But, still, I would argue that Oracle's better move would be to deepen the Novell relationship. Novell has shown a consistent committment to enterprise products, Oracle included - and has the track record of good enterprise support.
Personally, I can only say that I believe a move like this on Oracle's part would only serve to strengthen the position of Linux in the enterprise. As I alluded to above, the largest hurdle Red Hat could not overcome in my enterprise was poor support - something Oracle could easily address. So, in the end, it's a win for the industry...
But, why not just buy Red Hat? And, to my original question, how much does this hurt Novell?
Re:How much does this suck for Novell??? (Score:2, Informative)
You get what you pay for (Score:2, Insightful)
The danger is to grow faster than your organization can absorb (so you don't have former janitors as VPs of development). If you do, quality and customer satisfaction will
Sorry, but this is true (Score:5, Insightful)
I saw the tag "fud" for this article. Sorry, but this is not fud, it is the truth. You can give those standard Linux zealot lines about how if we had given more resources to it, had more, smarter sysadmins with better experience and so on and so forth that it would work. But the managers do not want to hear that, they are running a business, they are not in the Linux evangelism business. The reason they liked the idea of a switch is Red Hat on Intel is generally cheaper than Solaris on Sun boxes, and it would allow us to standardize on one UNIX platform. But there were just too many problems.
I am a Linux zealot myself, at home I have a Debian with no non-free software, not even non-free Java. But business does not think about that. The Linux kernel core team (Torvalds, Morton etc.) seem to have the strategy of competing for the high-end market with Microsoft and Sun (and some IBM lines, although IBM stands to benefit from Linux in other of its product lines). This seems like a good strategy to me since the high-end market seems up-for-grabs nowadays. Business feeling comfortable with Oracle running on a business-friendly distribution like Red Hat is essential. There are plenty of SQL Server databases running on Windows in production in Fortune 500 companies, how many Oracle on Red Hat's are there? This is essential. The worst-case scenario is it is still not there yet, Sun collapses, and Microsoft swallows up the market.
I am not just all talk - my home desktop is Debian with no non-free software. I evangelize Linux at work. I sent checks to the Free Software Foundation. I write GPL software. But this is not fud, this is reality that must be faced, and business feeling comfortable with Oracle on Red Hat is a must. Someone commented that Oracle support sucks and will they do better than Red Hat? Well, I don't know one way or the other as our DBA is who calls Oracle all the time. But this is important for Oracle, and Red Hat, and Linux and the whole free software community to get right.
Re:Sorry, but this is true (Score:2)
and since the day they where turned up the clusters we have never once had a single moment when the database has not been available.
Re:Sorry, but this is true (Score:2)
Not that it happened to just Oracle but also DB2, Lotus Notes and I just heard from someone that they saw the same problem on a 2 way running WebLogic.
Having said that, Redhat and IBM were very helpful in solving our problems regarding that bug. We don't pay for RHEL now unless its a box running a product that has a "supported configuration" mind you but Redhat has always been very good on the support side for us.
Re:Sorry, but this is true (Score:2)
As I said in my post, I knew this was the type of answer I would receive. On some arcane level this may be true - if the company's aim was not maximizing dividends for shareholders, but getting Red Hat and Oracle to work together, and we were fully staffed with the best sysadmins and DBAs out of MIT, then yes, perhaps on that arcane level there is a "sysadmin problem" (what about DBAs?). Of course, none of this is the case, like most companies there is much more work then the
Re:Sorry, but this is true (Score:2)
smart MIT dude could ha
Re:Sorry, but this is true (Score:2)
This statement may be true for a single processor, light box, but if you are setting up Oracle 10g RAC, that's just not true. Just blindly reading instructions off a web page isn't going to get you very far.
Add to the mix a SAN - where your data will most likely reside, proper drivers for your
Well somebody screwed up. (Score:2)
Yet I've gotten Oracle 9i and 10g humming quite nicely on RHEL3 and 4 (WS mind you), Fedora, and SLES 8 (United Linux). On x86 and x86_64. 9iR2 on RHEL 3 was a bit of a pain in the ass on AMD64 during install time, but once you got over a few humps you didn't have to worry about it again.
Solaris installs usually went smoother, but woe unto thee who neglected to install 32-bit userland packages on a 64-bit install.
Business model problems? (Score:2)
You need to RTFA (Score:3, Insightful)
Go RTFA. It doesn't say "Oracle will support Fedora" or "Oracle will support CentOS." It says "Oracle will support Redhat." As in the Redhat OS that you have to pay to get a copy of. It seems even Ellison doesn't get it either. To quote the article:
"We can just take Red Hat's intellectual property and make it ours, th
Re:Business model problems? (Score:2)
Re:Business model problems? (Score:2)
However, by dropping Red Hat Distro for the Desktop they have weakened their position somewhat. The average Joe cares less about Red Hat now because generally they use Suse, Debian, Ubuntu, and even Fedora.
Who gives a damn about the average Joe? The average Joe does not buy multi-thousand dollar support contracts. Companies do. Average Joes only pay a minimal amount for your OS and software when they buy their computer (if even then) and take up your phone lines with their problems. The money in Linux ri
The future of commercial software on Linux (Score:2)
Why?
Because you'll ship your own glibc with your product, and all other standard libraries, and whatever command line utilities your product uses in its start up scripts, including a bash shell. ls. chmod. I've already got a commercial product in production that is built this way, and includes those utils I mentioned. It also comes with its own perl 5.8, link
Re:The future of commercial software on Linux (Score:2)
in the future, and thus cause the Oracle tools not to work.
Riiight - like Oracle actually supports Oracle... (Score:2, Funny)
1) User submits ticket, giving detailed information of the exact module and section of code that is causing the problem.
2) Support immediately responds with a canned message that says they are working on it.
3) 24 hours go by with no further response, so user pings ticket.
4) Support asks user to post a pile of log output, most of which can hav
Someone wake me when... (Score:3, Interesting)
We spend well north of 300k per year with Oracle, and I've been disgusted with the support we receive from them. Coming from a mysql / Postgresql background, I was expecting a lot more when I started working with and supporting Oracle systems, but Oracle's support staff are consistently hard to understand and not able to function when your problem falls outside their script. Escalation can be time consuming and even then you're not guaranteed a solution.
If the answer isn't in metalink, you're in trouble.
A couple of weeks ago we ran into a problem with a RAC cluster. After 3 hours of downtime, we logged a call with Veritas as Oracle were insisting that Veritas was the problem. I really wished we logged that call a LOT earlier... The guy at Veritas took about 2 minutes to explain which Oracle component was at fault and how to fix it.
Having said that, Red Hat support is pretty appalling too. I've had some classic responses to support questions from them, including advice NOT to hotswap disks on an HP DL380 (despite it being designed for this).
Mostly, I just dislike Red Hat lately because of their draconian licensing policies on some of their products... I can't even get eval versions of products that have my code in them
What DOES this mean? (Score:3, Interesting)
By quick, I mean two days billable.
A client was demonstrating an application using Oracle running on EL3. Hardware platform was a SUN v40z, with 8GB of memory. The client had a "simple" problem -- the sysem was only using half of the available memory.
Solution? Of course its obvious. Simply deploy the large memory kernel. But, they had three Oracle people on site, who were not familiar. The client had brought in someone else, who had no clue. I was happy, because I get to bill at emergency rates (a demo was scheduled for less than a week away). The client also wanted me to look at kernel tuning for Oracle.
If Oracle starts providing this service, it will, of course, cut me out of the loop. But I don't think it can change right away. Oracle has to provide a lot of internal training first. I expect that there will be work "in them thar hills" for the next two years...
Ratboy
Re:Way to..... (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, in the open source world, this is where competition is probably going to go. Since the products are developed by the community, and some markets are flooded with options for product choice (media players, GUI dekstops, etc), the next real way to compete is going to be offering support for OSS products that someone _else_ is already offering support for.
It's not a hijack, its a competing service! Granted this situation is like a wal-mart moving into town, but it's still capitalism.
Re:Way to..... (Score:2)
Re:Way to..... (Score:2)
Interesting huh?
Re:Way to..... (Score:3, Interesting)
And the other question is: will Oracle work on the product releasing all sorts of products back to the community as Red Hat has done (tux, netscape directory server, kernel improvements too many to list, etc, etc), or will they just tell people which nobs to tweek to get their $$$ commercial product running? I'm guessing the latter, and the original post was right: Ellison is a
Re:Way to..... (Score:2)
I don't like it, because the
Re:Way to..... (Score:2)
Exactly how are Ellison's statements libelous?