Submitted by “Oracle’s offer of free support for Red Hat Linux was designed to inflict maximum pain on Red Hat. So it did. One day after the announcement, Red Hat shares lost 24 percent of their value. After watching his stock take a tumble, Red Hat’s CEO Matthew Szulik is in a bind. He has just absorbed the equivalent of a cyber-kick in the groin from a bigger, badder bully.”
…This is robbery, IMHO.
Of course it is perfectly legal otherwise.
Nah, morality has nothing to do with it. Competition is competition. Red Hat is in the unfortunate position of having its eggs in one support basket. If nothing else, this points out the need for Red Hat to diversify its product line.
More over, it tells them to differentiate themselves by putting out a real enterprise offering. Something that will work for small business with windows desktops as well as your large Linux only organizations. As it stands now, they seem to favor Linux only setups.
How can it be robbery when that is one of the touted benefits of open source? The source code is freely available, so you are free to get your support from someone else who better suits your needs.
Oracle is just putting that into practice.
That is why I said “morally” and yet legal.
Can somebody explain me how my comment “includes personal attacks/offensive language?”
That is the only reason why you can mod down a comment.
But the modding system is still being badly abused.
This unmotivated modding down proves only how childish and arrogant some users here are.
And now mod me down all the way to hell. At least I have said how I feel.
Can I point out that you can also be modded down for being “off-topic”
Not that I think you were in this case.
Well, if you follow the thread I created, I don’t believe I was off-topic. Maybe my use of the English language could have been better.
ARRRGH!
Enough with the constant “Mom! Help me! I’ve been mod’ down!” whining already!
Get a life!
– Gilboa
There is nothing morally wrong with this either. If you watch Revolution OS you will hear, I believe Eric Raymond, state something similar to:
The great thing about open source is that the distributor of the operating system does not have a monopoly on the support. If you by Windows, you have to go to Microsoft. With Linux distributions, you can choose which company will support your product and in the end the customer get better support due to competition.
There is nothing wrong with Oracle supporting Red Hat products. All Red Hat has to do is provide great support and value to their clients and they will have nothing to worry about. NOW, if they are abusing their position in the industry to fleece the customer, then they get what is coming to them.
This is the beauty (or vulnerability, depending on how your perceive this) of providing open source solutions.
Predatory pricing is more subtle than robbery. The simplest example is the everyday “Price-Match Guarantee” from a big-boxmart( The jibjab.com Big-Boxmart is a total gem – under their “Originals” tab, it is at the upper right ). Directly analogous to the Oracle move are discussions fetched by Google search on << Predatory Pricing Cable TV >>.
Albeit difficult to gauge its intention or impact. Clearly, Oracle was out to hurt Red Hat. Perhaps Oracle wants to pull Red Hat customers over to its own future distro. Which would give Oracle a complete software stack: OS, database, CRM, etc. Perhaps Oracle would even incorporate an office suite. The timing is curious. Perhaps Oracle thinks that it needs to build credibility in supporting Red Hat before it brings out its own distro.
“What, What, What……….OK!” Designed to inflict maximum pain.
Maybe IBM should buy/finance RH and make this more interesting..
IBM have done well not to fall for the trap of creating its own distro
another OS/2 isnt in their interests, they make their money off of middleware, not by giving away a free os
RH doesn’t make much from sales of its distro. It derives most of its revenue from support. IBM consulting already has a big business in Linux. They have no need to pony up money to buy RH to make money from Linux support.
This isn’t a zero sum game. Oracle’s move lends even more credibility to the idea of Enterprise Linux, and that of the RedHat Enterprise variety, in particular.
Personally, I’m not sure that Oracle is going to be able to do as good a job supporting RHEL as RedHat.
Plus, some of the reasons that Oracle has given for doing this are bogus. e.g. they say that users of older versions of RHEL want continued support. The only problem with that is that the very earliest release of RHEL was in March of 2002, and it and *still* has over 2.5 years of official support left.
Perhaps in May of 2009, Oracle can pick up some of RH’s RHEL 2.x customers that way.
RedHat does seem to be in a bit of a tizzy, though. Their official response comes off like one defensive statement after another. And the “Unfakable Linux” banner on their front page doesn’t make them look very confident, either.
I guess we’ll see. But I suspect RH is going to come out all right.
I also suspect that Larry will soon tire of this particular game and decide to go bully Wyse in the thin client market, or something like that, instead.
Edited 2006-10-29 19:25
See no one can force Microsoft or Apple into this situation because they have kept their IP. They provide a value that others can’t. In case of GPL’ed software, it is very difficult to do business and sooner or later corporations will relaize that.
I have said in past, some bigger corporations are acting like pimps by making Linux their whore to sell their condoms. IBM for example is supporting Linux to sell their properietary stuff on Linux and using Linux as a battle against Microsoft. Same is now what Oracle is doing, they don’t care about Linux or Morals, they just want to sell Oracle and make money.
I pity on Redhat that they made their whole business model around GPL software. And i feel sorry for their stock holder, i am glad i sold mine at a profit sometime back:)
Edited 2006-10-29 19:25
some bigger corporations are acting like pimps by making Linux their whore to sell their condoms.
The difference is that Linux itself in practically all cases actually benefits from being used – for whatever goal, by whoever.
raboof…i disagree. If linux ends up becoming a vehicle for corporations to deliver their other properiteray software, evnetually we will either see improvements in linux that are specific to these corporations intersts or no improvements because Linux as a standalone OS will not remain useful. There needs to be some vendor who has some motive of making business *only* from Linux and then they will improve linux. In this case Redhat was only making money off Linux but if redhat is killed or made not so important, do you really think Oracle will care that much to improve Linux except making its database run better on it?
I think someone should come up with a kick ass properiteray Linux Desktop tied with the GPL linux kernel, that company even if gets 10% of PC market share will have enough money to keep improving Linux. The freeloaders can obviously use GNOME or KDE at that point if they are truly fanatic about GPL or OSS>
In case of GPL’ed software, it is very difficult to do business and sooner or later corporations will relaize that.
Absolutely. Basically, anyone can use your work and make money out of it instead of you. This is fine if you’re not a company. But as long as you are a company, made to generate money to pay your bills, GPL is a real nightmare, this is what is happening to RH. But they should have expected that since the beginning. Come on, think about it: You have a very valuable that is free and endlessly renewable, who wouldn’t want to copy it and make money out of it (Selling support in this case)? Who wouldn’t want to share RH’s pie? RH should have either gone proprietary for their core business. Microsoft and Apple were smarter and Ballmer and Jobs must be laughing as we speak.
Who wouldn’t want to share RH’s pie? RH should have either gone proprietary for their core business. Microsoft and Apple were smarter and Ballmer and Jobs must be laughing as we speak.
Sure, maybe they’re laughing at RH, but they’re certainly not laughing. Linux only grows stronger by this – this is proof that it is a valuable enterprise OS – and Oracle is doing everything now to prove that they support it 100%
Yes, laughing all the way to irrelevance.
The important thing about the free software model is that you cannot kill it. Red Hat dies and blue hat starts off as a new company. Meanwhile, all the advacements in quality, robustness, and usability are kept and built upon.
Too bad for all those shareholders who invested their hard earned money into that respective company, and believed the words of its management that they have a long term stratergy.
Red Hat only has itself to blame; its spent bucket loads of money on hype, propaganda and marketing rather than investing and expanding their middleware, thus taking pressure off their need of having to push their operating system sales.
Sybase would be a good partnership right now, given the current state of affairs; and maybe this time, Red Hat can keep secrets to themselves rather than whoring their wares off in the form of ‘opensource’.
Unlike Sun, Red Hat have no IP muscle, no assets, nothing of any tangiable value which they can leverage if their is a drop in operating system sales/subscriptions; all their hardware sales are reliant on Dell and IBM, they have no middleware which can adequately compete with what IBM and Oracle (and many others) sell, and no worldwide consultancy services which match IBM’s Global Services depth and bredth.
“…its spent bucket loads of money on hype, propaganda and marketing rather than investing and expanding their middleware, thus taking pressure off their need of having to push their operating system sales.”
umm.. wasn’t development for Red Hat database (postgreSQL) dropped because pressure from Oracle? And anyway you can’t build successful midleware out of nothing that easy.
Novell is in better position in that sense it has been midleware company for years before it’s Linux business.
umm.. wasn’t development for Red Hat database (postgreSQL) dropped because pressure from Oracle? And anyway you can’t build successful midleware out of nothing that easy.
And now Sun has jumped into the group and working on PostgreSQL, why doesn’t Red Hat team up with Sun and work together on getting the Java Enterprise System and PostgreSQL privided on Linux, and Red Hat, once the Java Enterprise System has been opensourced, there is nothing stopping Red Hat from adopting and rebranding it as their own middleware layer.
Red Hat chooses to sit back and do nothing about the situation; and with PostreSQL on the low end, they can team up with IBM and DB2 for the high end; if Oracle wants a fight, then Red Hat should grow some balls and making something of it.
Exactly, RedHat made their bed and now they have to lie in it. If they’re surprised by this move, than they’re stupid. Obviously, this isn’t the death of RedHat, but will most likely usher in a leaner, meaner RedHat with, hopefully, a more mature, and realistic business plan.
so… what company did you start that generated more money than redhat? i will be so bold as to say you didnt.. (if you did, please correct me).
so perhaps you should take your realistic business plans somewhere else.
Exactly, RedHat made their bed and now they have to lie in it. If they’re surprised by this move, than they’re stupid.
Exactly. If you release software that you plan to sell under a license that says anybody can modify and re-distribute it, if the software is valuable, somebody will eventually come along and either give it away for free (CentOS), or sell it for cheaper (Oracle). And if they sell support (one of the few ways you can actually make money off GPL’d software) for cheaper than you do, and the support is good, then you’re pretty much up shit creek without a paddle.
For this reason, I don’t think I would ever release commercial software under a license like this. Althoug the whole ‘free love’ idea is good in concept, if it ends up putting me out of business, then I’ll have to sacrificice the good of mankind for my ability to put food on the table.
if the software is valuable, somebody will eventually come along and either give it away for free (CentOS)
CentOS has been available for years. I don’t think it had any effect on RedHat’s bottomline. Oracle’s free support option, as far as I can tell, is equivalent to CentOS
And if they sell support (one of the few ways you can actually make money off GPL’d software) for cheaper than you do, and the support is good, then you’re pretty much up shit creek without a paddle.
That’s competition; being proprietary won’t help much in this regard: Just look at how Apple screwed over small developers with Sherlock and Dashboard.
As for the quality of the support, I doubt Oracle has the same experience as RH when it comes to support the RHEL. After all, RH built the distro and they obviously have better ideas about its inner workings, which would definitely aid troubleshooting (esp. when you have a non-trivial problem)
And if they sell support (one of the few ways you can actually make money off GPL’d software) for cheaper than you do, and the support is good, then you’re pretty much up shit creek without a paddle.
That’s competition; being proprietary won’t help much in this regard: Just look at how Apple screwed over small developers with Sherlock and Dashboard.
Actually, it would. If I am proprietary, then I don’t have competitors giving away my software, so I don’t have to depend on support to drive profits. IMHO, this idea of giving away software to sell support is not a smart business move. Because somebody can easily come along and offer better support than you, and they wouldn’t have the overhead of actually developing the software to begin with. So, not only do you have to write the software AND provide support, they’d usually only have to do support, along with maybe a few patches to fix bugs.
Not only that, but if your main source of revenue was to charge for support, how inclined are you to make your software easy to use so that your customers don’t even need support to begin with?
WorknMan,
You’re only considering one side of the equation and only seeing the challenges of open source business models and not the benefits.
You’re forgetting that Red Hat doesn’t write most of the code they support. They’re a huge benefactor of code produced by _other_ people. So it isn’t theirs to decide whether to “give” it away or not. They leverage that code, which they extend (and return to the community that gave them the code in the first place), and offer support on the result. It’s a fair trade for them, and a good deal for their customers.
Now perhaps Oracle can compete with Red Hat and offer better or equal support at a lower price. But that’s far from being an established fact. Even if Oracle does manage to get some customers, any patches they produce to improve the software can be snatched up by Red Hat! So Red Hat will get an improved offering paid for by Oracle. Gotta love the GPL.
If I am proprietary, then I don’t have competitors giving away my software, so I don’t have to depend on support to drive profits
Again, RedHat did NOT write the whole software stack. They contributed to it, but so did IBM, Novell and many other companies.
My example was used to illustrate that software sales are just as unreliable (if not more unreliable) as support contracts. Even if a competitor doesn’t have your code, they can still copy your idea. It doesn’t even depend on the quality of the software: Big player can just bundle it to their flagship products and you are done for. The only way to guarantee this sale is through format lock-in.
OSS creates a level playing field by allowing everyone to have to same quality software. This means companies will be judged on the quality of support alone. They don’t have to deal with bundling, lock in and other anticompetitive measures from their competitors.
Because somebody can easily come along and offer better support than you, and they wouldn’t have the overhead of actually developing the software to begin with.
Actually, it’s not as simple as that. The maker of the software will always have an advantage when it comes to offering support simply because they know their code. Considering that many support calls are non-trivial, this is a big advantage.
they’d usually only have to do support, along with maybe a few patches to fix bugs.
Your ability to fix bugs depends largely on your knowledge of the code.
Not only that, but if your main source of revenue was to charge for support, how inclined are you to make your software easy to use so that your customers don’t even need support to begin with?
So you are of the opinion that with point and click, anyone can properly administer a mission-critical server? We are not talking about desktops that can be installed and reinstalled. We are talking about machines that have to run 24-7.
Edited 2006-10-30 00:39
considering that Fedora, White box, and CentOS all have many users not getting RH support I’d say they do quite well at keeping themselves out of the support business unnecessarily. RH has thought quite hard about what people are willing to PAY for support, versus who wants Red Hat. They use the people that want it “FREE” as guinea pigs for their paying clients..
Paying for support is a huge deal for companies, RH charges per term, not by call.. it’s in their interest NOT to have you call, that costs money. Companies expect to call with highly technical problems and to get the issue fixed, code patched in a limited time frame… THAT’s what they’re paying for, not the mythical “using” the software other vendors charge for.
“Paying for support is a huge deal for companies, RH charges per term, not by call.. it’s in their interest NOT to have you call, that costs money. Companies expect to call with highly technical problems and to get the issue fixed, code patched in a limited time frame… THAT’s what they’re paying for, not the mythical “using” the software other vendors charge for.”
That’s an outstanding point.
Oracle’s, and Microsoft’s, support is based on pay per incident. Therefore, it’s in their (Oracle’s and Microsoft’s) best interests to put out buggy crap, so they can rake in more support dollars on their licensed proprietary product.
Red Hat’s support is based on pay per term. They don’t charge per incident. Thus, it’s in their best interests to make sure their stuff works, and the customer is happy. Otherwise, RH loses money on the deal. And knowing that RH’s entire business plan is based on supporting their Linux distro (and the distro itself is free), you’d think that going with Red Hat would be by far the safest, best choice, and by far the best value.
Stupid CIOs will chose Oracle support, being lured by the reduced up-front cost.
Smart CIOs will stick with Red Hat support.
Another important thing to consider is the fact that Oracle is supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux, removing Red Hat branding. This is validating Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Red Hat the company, and it’s invalidating Oracle’s own engineering.
Oracle’s, and Microsoft’s, support is based on pay per incident. Therefore, it’s in their (Oracle’s and Microsoft’s) best interests to put out buggy crap, so they can rake in more support dollars on their licensed proprietary product.
Nonsense.
I’ve seens situations where Microsoft has spent 20 – 30 hours on an incidents, involving 3 or more people from different support teams.
All for $250.
They don’t make money off that.
The absolute best things about pay per incident is that the time is open ended and you choose to pay or look for the answer elsewhere.
Microsoft support is cheap unless you plan to call them with simple things. And even then many Microsoft support members refund your money.
You guys have offered up some insightful comments. Thanks
These are some well thought out answers to this situation. And me, being an avid linux user, believe Open Source will live long and prosper!
Obviously, this isn’t the death of RedHat, but will most likely usher in a leaner, meaner RedHat with, hopefully, a more mature, and realistic business plan.
Funny, I could’ve sworn you just implicitly stated Red Hat’s buisness plan was immature and unrealistic, while they’re only being undercut on the price.
As far as I can tell, Oracle is not offering free support; this would be incorrectly stated in the article summary. From here:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/10/25/HNoracleredhat_1.html
“Pricing for Oracle support for Red Hat Linux will start from US$99 per system per year for bug fixing and patches rising to $1,199 for premium support, which includes indemnification.”
The only thing that is free, are the software updates Redhat provides. Oracle will redistribute those after removing the trademarks, but that’s a far cry from ‘real’ support, which is the bread-and-butter of Redhat’s buisness. The only thing happening is prices being lowered, which might actually generate a bigger market for both RH and Oracle.
Funny, I could’ve sworn you just implicitly stated Red Hat’s buisness plan was immature and unrealistic, while they’re only being undercut on the price
If you would try reading you would see that nothing was ever said about RedHat being free.
But when RedHat’s only IP is their trademark, which can easily be ripped out, then yeah, it’s immature and unrealistic.
Novell should take notice, and so should everybody else living in the fairy land of open-source-feel-good-vibes.
The only thing happening is prices being lowered, which might actually generate a bigger market for both RH and Oracle
Haha, yeah, please tell RedHat that this is a good thing.
Haha, yeah, please tell RedHat that this is a good thing.
Maybe RH has been overcharging their customers all along.
“””Maybe RH has been overcharging their customers all along.”””
Unlikely. Customers can get the software for free. ( http://www.centos.org ) And they have always had the option of a third party support contract… or none at all, if that is what they desire.
I suspect that RedHat has very few unhappy support customers, as any who felt they were being overcharged or did not need a support contract would likely have moved to CentOS by now and made other arrangements for support if they need it.
So their current customer base is made up of customers who are there because they want to be.
And it is absolutely crucial to understand this.
RedHat’s most valuable asset is not the software that they don’t own. It’s really not even the quality of the support that they can provide, though that is of extremely high importance and I don’t mean to minimize it.
Their most valuable asset is their reputation for providing a solid product and refraining from the usual lock-in strategies that software vendors use.
Balmer says Developers! Developers! Developers!
RedHat says Reputation! Reputation! Reputation!
This is also why they are so anal about their trademarks, btw.
They are walking a very, very thin line, and destruction lies on either side of it.
They *can’t* overcharge. By that, I don’t mean that they don’t dare overcharge. I mean that without lock-in, the fair price is what the market will bear. Without lock-in, overcharging is an impossibility.
Addendum:
I suspect that someone might wan’t to point out that RH does not make RHEL available for free in binary form. True enough. But they do go way beyond what the license requires to make nice, easily compiled SRPMS available to projects like CentOS. They could dump the raw source on them and the FSF would be happy. But they don’t do that. They go the extra mile to make community supported versions of RHEL not only possible… but actually practical.
Edited 2006-10-29 21:40
They *can’t* overcharge. By that, I don’t mean that they don’t dare overcharge. I mean that without lock-in, the fair price is what the market will bear. Without lock-in, overcharging is an impossibility.
I guess I used the word “overcharge” in a misleading way. “More bang for your buck” is more like it.
I think everyone is interested in seeing how long Oracle will last with their price point/their customer satisfaction.
Edited 2006-10-29 22:08
But when RedHat’s only IP is their trademark, which can easily be ripped out, then yeah, it’s immature and unrealistic.
I think people need to be reminded that the primary purpose behind IP is not to make money on them, but to encourage inventors to open up their work so that society can benefit from it.
RH is not making money from their IP: They are making money from their expertise, part of which comes from the fact that they built RHEL.
Edited 2006-10-29 21:13
See no one can force Microsoft or Apple into this situation because they have kept their IP. They provide a value that others can’t.
“Redmond, start your photocopiers” has a grim side to it too, you know…
instead of selling … you should have bought at the Friday Dip
It isn’t Red Hat’s software.
Red Hat did not develope Gnome, or KDE, or MySQL, or Apache.
They don’t own GCC or the Linux Kernel or Firefox.
Why do people think there is something wrong with opensource software.
Now, as a consumer, you have a 4th major choice for Enterprise software.
That is good.
It is certainly good for Red Hat … Oracle just told the world that THEY think (of the supported OSes for Oracle), RHEL is the best Enterprise Linux out there … how can that be bad for Red Hat.
If Oracle did every bit of the RH Linux Business it would add about $0.02 to their value.
Having one of the largest software companies in the world say your model is best … that is priceless
I read an article which said that one way round Oracle’s blow would be for Red Hat to introduce just enough proprietary stuff into to make life hard for Oracle and force them to pretty well fork rather than imitate as a) they would have to leave some important things out and b) they’d start getting into a mess over certifications. This is already what Novell do and so Oracle couldn’t clone SLES even if it wanted to.
I certainly don’t welcome our new Oracle overlords just because they say they’re good guys. Watch their track record with Linux and see what they do. If it’s all take, take, take and no giving back I doubt they’ll find many F/OSS supporters.
I read an article which said that one way round Oracle’s blow would be for Red Hat to introduce just enough proprietary stuff into to make life hard for Oracle and force them to pretty well fork rather than imitate
RH may very well consider this strategy. However, I am not sure if that move is really necessary: Having the source code is not the same as knowing the code.
Also, Redhat could change the availability of the source. Important parts of the distribution are released under BSD license and don’t require the source be released except as courtesy. Redhat is going beyond the license in making all the source available. Also, the GPL allows distributing source to customers not to the public. It is a grey area if the distribution licene, which threatens the support if violated, could stop somebody which isn’t interested in the support.
Hiding the source would kill free rebuilds like CentOS. But it wouldn’t allow Oracle to claim that their distribution is compatible with RHEL. Redhat has always been friendly to open-source, releasing all of their own programs as GPL. It would be a shame if they were forced into being less open.
I think the threat may be overstated. I would not take a knee-jerk wallstreet reaction to be meaningful of anything long term. Stock traders often don’t know squat about this sort of thing.
It may be worth reading this article by the president and CEO of Linspire:
“Oracle Support,” an Oxymoron
http://forum.linspire.com/viewtopic.php?t=426476
1. Oracle support of its database is too expensive. Plus when they have problems their answer is to send consulants (that you pay for at more than $250 an hour) to write patches to fix their bugs while falsely explaining it is customization to suit your needs. Just ask Ford Motor Company (7 years and $4B of development work on a program that never worked as advertised, any wonder they are in trouble?) or the US Army among others.
2. Currently Oracle is selling some programs that they know are not working as advertised, in the hope of having the customers pay for much of the development work.
3. If Oracle’s idea of free support matches that current product support, “free support” will be very expensive.
1. RH should put all its effort into getting a replacement Oracle´s DB solution. That if anything would scare Oracle and drive down prices. Screw Linux, Oracle doesn´t care for that. Hit ´em where it hurts.
2. Build it new, built it on an existing open source solution, built it somehow, but build it fast.
Those claiming that GPL is bad for business should realise that without the GPL, without the whole GNU/Linux/FOSS thing, there wouldn’t have been any Red Hat in the first place. So I frankly don’t understand this “GPL will kill RH” type of comments at all.
If Oracle’s move will end up killing Red Hat, it will be more an instance of a company with more resources eating one with less, which happens in non-GPL-related cases too.
The idea that “Ballmer and Jobs must be laughing” is preposterous, since RHAT’s revenue is only a fraction of AAPL and MSFT. But ORCL’s is not, so this merely shows that Linux means business, more than ever.
You don’t undestand why GPL is killing RH? It’s because RH accepted to be forced to give away their hard work. This is an anti-business decision to work and to release your work under the GPL.
Without the GPL there wouldn’t be RH? I agree. So what? There would be Debian and Gentoo because the guys who work for these projects don’t depend on their success to make a living, whereas RH does.
That simple. I’m not blaming GPL, I’m just saying you have to be careful not to put your business and your employees in jeopardy.
You don’t undestand why GPL is killing RH? It’s because RH accepted to be forced to give away their hard work.
They didn’t write all the code in the software stack. Many volunteers and companies (eg. IBM) contributed to the code. Also, remember that it’s not just the linux kernel, but also associated software stack: Hibernate, Apache httpd etc. That’s a lot of software to write even for MS.
Also, RH, being the builder of the distro, should have a better idea about its inner workings. I am sure that will come in handy when it comes to solving non-trivial support calls.
Those claiming that GPL is bad for business should realise that without the GPL, without the whole GNU/Linux/FOSS thing, there wouldn’t have been any Red Hat in the first place. So I frankly don’t understand this “GPL will kill RH” type of comments at all.
Nonsense. RedHat could have become a BSD company, or the Linux kernel could have been licensed under something else.
Um, how would you relicense the Linux kernel?
Those claiming that GPL is bad for business should realise that without the GPL, without the whole GNU/Linux/FOSS thing, there wouldn’t have been any Red Hat in the first place
I disagree. OS X from Apple is an example on what a company can do with BSD without losing their IP and make money.
Edited 2006-10-29 21:32
>> Those claiming that GPL is bad for business should realise that without the GPL, without the whole GNU/Linux/FOSS thing, there wouldn’t have been any Red Hat in the first place
> I disagree. OS X from Apple is an example on what a company can do with BSD without losing their IP and make money.
I wasn’t trying to contrast the GPL with the BSD License (which I never even mentioned), I was merely saying that RHAT has built a multi million dollar business on GPL stuff and it’s still around.
Sure, corporations come and go, but some people here seem to imply that Red Hat is already dead in the water, and even that that’s all because of the GPL. That is simply completely unfounded. Apple Computers has been declared dead numerous times before F/OSS got hot, and the GPL has clearly been to the benefit of companies like Novell.
So just wait and see what’ll happen, my dear prophets.
I disagree. OS X from Apple is an example on what a company can do with BSD without losing their IP and make money.
Apple does release the source of their BSD stack. Apple is not making money from their software either. Most of their profit is earned through hardware sales (including iPods).
and hopefully they can put a dent in Oracle’s business.
Besides who wants to speak to an Indian anyway.
“Tank you come again”
Besides who wants to speak to an Indian anyway.
“Tank you come again”
Stupid racist. Indians are smarter and more workaholic than you.
>> Besides who wants to speak to an Indian anyway.
>> “Tank you come again”
> Stupid racist. Indians are smarter and more workaholic than you.
I agree. My Indian colleagues are, for the most part, very highly qualified and pleasant to deal with. Math, science, and problem solving skills know no boarders, gender, or religion. You just need to find good people.
I just don’t see in here what is going to hurt RH aside from hype. Free clones are nothing new, and I’m not sure I believe Oracle can really deliver on their promises, or even that they are making any that are meaningful (it largely reads to me as unsubstantiated badmouthing of RH). Oracle has a history of being big, bad, and predatory, but not a history of running everything smoothly.
No doubt this is going to affect RH, but I’m not sure the effects will be too bad. If this were IBM, I think it would be the bell tolling for RH, but Oracle…it’ll shake ’em up, but I bet RH will come out OK.
If Oracle was, in fact, offering to support Red Hat for free, as the article claims, it would be bad news for Red Hat.
But Oracle doesn’t do *anything* for free, and I’m not sure how they intend to offer better support than Red Hat for Red Hat products, while at the same time charging less.
While this makes great fodder for the anti GPL folks, there’s really not a big problem here. Red Hat still has great offerings and will be able to compete with Oracle just fine.
This should really be seen as an example of how the GPL protects _users_ from being overcharged or losing control of the source. If the GPL allowed a company to just take the source and build a closed product on top of it, we’d be worse off as users. We’d be locked into that one vendor with all that implies for higher pricing.
But here we see the value of the GPL. A competitor saw that they could provide the “same” service as Red Hat at a cheaper price. If it’s true, the users win by getting another support option at lower cost. If it’s not true, Oracle will quietly retreat from the business somewhere down the road.
This should make many more businesses sit up and realize just how good the GPL is to protect them from the whims of a single source vendor like say Microsoft.
Recent numbers show that the uptake of Linux is continuing at a good pace in the corporate world. This news, properly understood, should help that even more.
With more Linux users, comes more business for Red Hat and other service providers who understand how to make a buck by providing real value to their customers.
Cheers.
Caveat: I work for Sun. You can all tell me how biased I am later, but I work on Linux all day every work day and have since 1998.
I agree that RedHat will probably be just fine, but only so long as they maintain their grip on defining the platform. By this I mean providing for Linux what commercial operating systems provide: a reference against which application vendors can certify their software.
Why does anyone use RedHat at all? Because in order to get a support contract from the vendors of their enterprise applications, they must run one of a very few distributions and distribution versions. Early on, RedHat became the face of Linux and the dominant vendor in the U.S. and so defined the platform. They defined “linux”, if you will (yea, pretty stupid statement. But there you go).
Oracle actually certifies on far more distributions than many other companies. Most just to RHEL or RHEL and SuSE SLES. This, the availability of support contracts from applications vendors, is the real reason these distributions dominate in the enterprise.
Most of us can use whatever distribution/kernel mix we want, or even roll our own. Companies cannot. They need to run EMC NetWorker with an Oracle DB and SAS and accounting package. If they want to use Linux, it’s probably going to be RH. The support matrix will decide for them.
If RH looses the ability to define the platform, they will cease to exist much faster than if a whole slew of companies start providing support.
What tux68 said. Red Hat will be fine. Oracle is in for a learning experience.
It sounds all gloom and doom for RH, but ill be surprised if they go any where over night.
You get what you pay for, in oracles case you have a company that can barely update it’s core application in an orderly fashion. The latest update from oracle was large and left a lot of bugs still open. Do you really think they are gonna be able to keep up with bug fixes and support.
The only way oracle will be able to do that is to keep it’s OS in sync with RH’s.
The reason why so many people are using RH over other distro’s and in some cases other OS’s full stop is the outstanding support. Support which really matters to the larger company’s, with red hat no problem is left unsolved and is fixed quick and well, which will be what saves them.
I just don’t think oracle can keep up with OS maintaince and OS support.
As said above in other posts, i hope that RH comes out stronger from this change of events, as they have been giving a lot to the linux community (bug fixes and solid distro in fedora).
Red Hat shares lost 24 percent of their value. After watching his stock take a tumble, Red Hat’s CEO Matthew Szulik is in a bind.
Yer. There’s a knee jerk reaction to Oracle’s panic reaction, and then a return to normality when people realise that it hasn’t made any difference to Red Hat and Oracle is still at risk from cheaper alternatives.
If anything, this should hasten Red Hat’s moves to bump Postgres up to being the official Red Hat database and pushing JBoss more. If they do that, and increase their offerings for the money, then Oracle is going to be in a lot of trouble. Can Oracle outdo Red Hat doing what Oracle does, or can Red Hat outdo Oracle doing what Red Hat does. The latter scenario is a fair bit more likely, and the kicking and screaming from Oracle is going to be fun to watch.
People, and analysts especially, don’t realise that competing aggressively with an open source company that has little to lose is an extremely bad idea. Red Hat doesn’t have the revenues that Oracle, and Novell, have from proprietary software that they dsperately need to protect. The only way for Red Hat, using cheaper open source software, is up.
Except that this is how Larry does business.. that makes this worse for Red Hat. They need to get the SEC to start watching who’s buying the stock as it drops.. This is similar to what Larry did to Peoplesoft when Oracle wanted to buy them… they started FUDing the news every day so long term customers started pulling out of Peoplesoft’s business leaving them no choice but to sell out…. that’s not fair competition.
I’d fear Oracle is pulling the same thing here. On the lowest level, Oracle is just trying to bundle services their customers already use to gain a little money.. the OS is GPL after all, you can’t stop them. But watch the news.. the stock fall is particularly worrisome because Oracle is known to be predatory when they want something… no matter what the market determines. You’d think Red Hat should be OK.. many have tried to beat them and they always stick around because they have street cred… Like you said Oracle can’t afford to drop them because too many customers use their Linux distro, is Oracle going to support all those other apps tied to RH as well, many, many, smaller companies refuse to deal with Oracle in any fashion because of their reputation. I would suppose that Oracle could try to force the hand and buy RH out a la Peoplesoft, but all the trained staff would jump ship to somebody else overnight… Just like oracle can take the OS and run so can RH employees!! Remember what happened to JBoss when the Boss turned into a jerk…
I thought how awful at first and then I recalled how a new version of oracle came out and I had to alter sqlplus scripts because using the CLEAR command shut down further HOST commands, just blows past them like a comment, causing me to think that quality control is a bag of wet dung and testing must be something left to the customers at oracle. One can imagine what their distro will look like and that’s not a very pretty picture. Finish and polish would not appear to me to be their forte, take their portal effort for one extremely butt ugly example. Oracle may get to learn a painful lesson about reach exceeding one’s grasp.
6 Months ago, we started a new project and one part was an Oracle 10G RAC (real application cluster) setup with 5 database servers on SUSE SLES 9. Oracle sent us our shiny 10G RAC install cds and we placed the files on an NFS mount so our DBAs could do their magic to install Oracle. We also had to change a few kernel parameters.
DBA: It won’t install.
Me: What does it say?
DBA: mv: command not found, cp: command not found, etc
Me: What? Are you serious?
DBA: yes
After looking through the mess of Oracle install scripts, I noticed that one of them set PATH to the oracle install directory instead of appending it to the existing path. This resulted in removing directories like /bin and /sbin from the current path. Manually editing the broken scripts that Oracle sent us fixed the problem.
Its funny that Oracle thinks they can do what Redhat does better than Redhat when they can’t even support their flagship product. In the long run, people will see Redhat does a superior job of supporting their product and far outclasses Oracle. Throwing money at something is not the same as building it from scratch. Oracle can’t compare to Redhat on that regard.
Yes, RH stock took a big hit, because, well, Wall Street is stupid.
However, an important factor involved is quality of support, reputation, and getting support from the source and/or those that really developed the product. The RH engineers know Linux, and GNU, and all the services, DE’s, productivity apps, etc inside and out. Oracle, while no doubt posessing many talented engineers, does not.
Then there is the CIO vendor value survey, which ranks big vendors on support, based on surveys of CIOs of big corporations that use big vendor products.
Red Hat’s ranking? – Number 1, numero uno, the top of the heap.
Oracle’s ranking? – 39 – that’s THIRTY-FRIGGIN’-NINE!!
You’d think that with Oracle’s huge, international support staff, thousands of high paid, talented engineer’s, and huge product portfolio, they’d manage to get in the top ten.
But nope, they can only muster 39 …. 39!!
And Oracle’s version of support is to take forever to issue patches, to simply throw $250/hr consultants at a customer site (when the customer already paid for support of their broken product), and to do frequent software audits, to see how many more $$$$$$$ they can rape the customer for.
Then take Oracle’s reputation for bloated, buggy software, and often times selling vaporware (which got them in big trouble in the ’90’s), and you got a vendor that one should avoid like the plague.
But sadly, there’s always the stigma of “nobody ever got fired for going with insert-big-vendor-name-here” (Oracle, MS, SAP, IBM, HP, etc).
Meanwhile, conservative, narrow thinking big corporations gleefully flush their money down the toilet in the interest of going with the “safe choice”, or the “big name”. And the Oracle’s of the world laugh their way all the way to bank.
Sad, stupid, and funny.
But the good news is that Red Hat’s brand and reputation are both rock solid. There is absolutely no attraction for someone to go with Oracle’s support, at least for anyone aware of Oracle’s penchant for hoovering people’s wallet, even knowing they’re undercutting RH prices. In short, is very very very very worth it to pay extra in the short term for RH’s rock solid support, where they’ll make solid, reliable, timely patches, and solve their problems at no additional costs, as opposed to paying less in the short term for Oracle, but paying waaaaaaay more in the long term.
Both HP, and especially IBM, need a healthy Red Hat. A major part of their hardware and services businesses depend on RHEL (along with Novell SuSE), and their rock solid reputation, and stable, consistent, fully tested and integrated Linux.
Then add the fact that IBM compete’s vigorously with Oracle in both the database market and the J2EE application server market. There’s no way in hell IBM is going to let RHEL be supported by Oracle on their hardware. For one, Oracle patches are likely to break hardware compatibility. Two, the Oracle version of RH will no doubt be bundled/hooked into, with the Oracle DB, Oracle J2EE app server, and other products. An Oracle supported version of RH is no good for IBM.
Thus, I wouldn’t be surprised if IBM comes out with saying they won’t certify the Oracle version of RH on their hardware, and at the same time pump some money into RH, and market Red Hat more.
Ultimately, that’s Oracle’s weakness. They’re a software company only. They depend of the big servers sold by IBM, HP, Sun, Dell, and others. And it’s in the best interests for those hd vendors to have RH as a partner/choice, rather than Oracle.
I wouldn’t be a bit suprised if the very first patch of Oracle’s “Unbreakable Linux” breaks compatibility with MySQL, Postgresql, (and DB2) and JBoss (and WebSphere and WebLogic).
In fact, I could almost garauntee it.
Oracle’s gonna make damn sure their version of RH, or “Unuseable Linux” (as I call it), works terrifically with Oracle’s DB and their J2EE app server, but makes it a living hell for admins to deploy MySQL, PostgreSQL, DB2, WebSphere, WebLogic, JBoss, or any other product that compete’s with Oracle’s, on it.
Red Hat Advanced server is a very expensive product compromising mostly of freely available software.
The only reason you have to spend thousands of dollars first to get Red Hat AS and then to Oracle is that Oracle wont support cheaper versions of Red Hat and vice verse.
If i remember correctly this is not a first time in Oracles history when they blunder OS whit database, makes perfect sense to them and to their customers.
This is probably the major threat to Redhat. Not that Oracle is copying their distribution or supporting it for less, but that they can force people who use Oracle to run their Linux.
I have heard from lots of people that the main reason they pay for RHEL instead of using Centos is that they need to run Oracle on it. Oracle licenses and database support are really expensive. It is worth paying a little more for RHEL to get the extra comfort and make Oracle support happy.
What this shows more than anything else is that the global stock market is nothing more than a hot air balloon. It’s scary and fascinating at the same time to imagine what will happen when it’ll finally burst properly.
You might find, that the new deal with Oracle is not as fine as you might think.
For example, Oracle cannot use the RedHat certification setup RedHat uses internally to ensure all the software works fine.
Oracle can get the source and binaries, but they can only ever work AFTER RedHat, or they fork completely and then they have their own distro, having also to bear the cost to maintain that disro.
So it is a short-time punch from Oracle towards Redhat. In the long run, whoever is better will stay ahead in the race.
If Oracle then is still cheaper, well, thats the advantage of the free market. And thanks to free software you will find yourselves in a position where you can switch vendors easily. Keeps prices down and service up, the part of capitalism I like.