linux-watch.com — No one saw this coming. People talked about Oracle making its own Linux, or buying a Linux company (Ubuntu?). But, the news that Oracle is erasing Red Hat's trademarks from Unbreakable Linux and supporting it for less than Red Hat is a bolt from the blue.
Oct 25, 2006 View in Crawl 4
nobananasOct 26, 2006
While problematic for Red Hat, Oracle's move is good for the Linux community if they can back up the promises.
vvvvOct 26, 2006
This bolt from the blue about Red Hat has me thinking that Oracle is yellow. Wait, don't mind me, I'm just green with envy. I'm sure this issue isn't as simple as black and white.
thripperOct 26, 2006
<a class="user" href="http://www.oracle.com/technologies/linux/index.html?pageregion=ocom_hp_a_main_1_Linux_102506">http://www.oracle.com/technologies/linux/index.html?pageregion=ocom_hp_a_main_1_Linux_102506</a>"Today, Oracle Database is #1 on Linux with more than 80% market share"Is it ? I thought it was postgresql or smth.
raynevandunemOct 27, 2006
Question: is it only server or big enterprise companies who are taking any interest in Linux distributors? Sun being interested in Canonical/Ubuntu, IBM being interested in Novell/SuSE, and now Oracle being interested (OK, maybe interested isn't the right word for this situation) in Red Hat.Is it because of Unix/Unix-like systems being traditionally associated with, and thus attracting, those types of companies? That's constantly being pointed out (Linux being good only for servers), but the pro-DesktopLinux continues to butt against this suggestion, citing Apple's Mac OS X as an outstanding example of Unix desktop (even though Unix barely features in any advertising for Apple's line of computers).I'm just wondering, since surely there should've been some major, widely-publicized inroads for DesktopLinux every year we heard about how this year will be the "year of Linux on the Desktop".Are the Linux distributions just attracting unintended denizens like Oracle, or is it something inherent about Linux itself?Or maybe they're talking about the corporate desktop, and not the home desktop which matters to the rest of us?
altotusOct 27, 2006
Where to start. Oracle products are peculiarly problematic to install and configure under Linux -- in ways that are unlike anything other commercial product available today. I think that's a testament to just how clueless Oracle really is about Linux.The other things you mention aren't particularly valid. The kernel ABI only varies between major revisions of the kernel. The GNU C library stabilized years ago as well. Those criticisms may have applied some year ago, but are no longer valid.Today, you'll find little subtantial variation in the basic operatin environment between distributions. We use lots of commercial physical chemistry applications for Linux and the packages work at least on RedHat, SuSe, and Mandriva (what he have in the office), and the commercial video editing software I use at home runs on at least RedHat, SuSe, Mandriva, Xandros, and Ubuntu without any problem and installed from the same package. There's very little particular to a distribution today that would affect whether an application would run on it. Certainly, if you stick to the top dozen or so distributions you can bet they will run any commercial application without a problem.
blackadderiiiOct 27, 2006
I looks like lots of people writing about corporate tech are dinosaurs, psychologically stuck in 1992 and fundamentally unable to grasp the idea of free software.Nobody is stealing anything from anyone.Red Hat specifically stipulated that anyone who wants to, can take, modify and redistribute some of their code.If Oracle do that, or I do that, or the reader does that, there is no problem. You sell your support and developer skills as a commodity (something fundamental to open source software) - if you do it well you succeed, if you do it incompetently, lazily or at extortionate prices, you will fail. If you try to screw your customers, you will fail. If you try to impose lockin, you will fail.Everyone's a winner.There is no problem. This is what the GPL is, this is what it does.
jaeleeOct 28, 2006
Red hat has nothing to fear since Oracle released a broken OS...<a class="user" href="http://ultramookie.com/wayback/2006/10/26/uncompatible-linux/">http://ultramookie.com/wayback/2006/10/26/uncompatible-linux/</a>And the kernel has a different version than RHEL4. Can anyone say "fork"?