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http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/7430AF09A8CC964DCC25721B0007FCBE
Oracle’s Red Hat push spurs mixed views
The database giant’s plan to offer
cut-price Red Hat support fazes some, but not others
By Eric Lai Framingham | Monday,
6 November, 2006
Red Hat has come out fighting against
Oracle’s plan to offer Red Hat support services for roughly half of what
Red Hat itself charges.
It says it won’t cut its prices for Linux support contracts and questions
Oracle’s motives.
At Oracle’s annual OpenWorld conference, held in
In a response emblazoned “Unfakeable Linux” and posted on its
website, Red Hat raises doubts about the value and compatibility of
Oracle’s offering. Its view is in contrast to enthusiasm from the head of
the lOUG (Independent Oracle Users Group), the largest Oracle user
organisation.
“The IOUG is extremely excited by Oracle’s announcement for
enterprise-class support for Linux,” says
According to the IOUG, about half of its members run their databases on Linux.
Reaction from vendors that already provide support for Red Hat, many of whom
also do significant business with Oracle, was muted.
“[IBM] thinks Oracle’s move is a validation of the space,”
according to a spokesman.
IBM has supported customers running Red Hat and Novell’s SUSE Linux for
five years with more than 7,000 full- and part-time Linux consultants, the
spokesman says.
IBM will continue to work with Red Hat on providing patches to RHEL and will
continue to price its support offerings “similar to Red Hat to avoid
channel conflict, because we want customers to feel comfortable buying support
from either one of us”, the spokesman says.
Hewlett-Packard, another leading provider of Linux support, says it
“supports Oracle’s plans” and is “pursuing a number of
options with Oracle to ensure our ability to extend the benefits of the
offering to customers,” says an emailed response from an HP spokeswoman.
More direct rivals of Oracle were less enthusiastic. “Oracle is taking
the work that Red Hat is doing and charging less for it in an attempt to bypass
Red Hat as a vendor,” says Dave Dargo, chief technology officer at open
source database provider Ingres.
In a blog entry titled “Bull*&#%!”, Dargo questions
Oracle’s numbers, pointing out that any savings from switching from Red
Hat to Oracle support for Linux pale in comparison to the licence fee for the
Oracle database presumed to be running on top.
“[And] if Oracle is tremendously successful in taking Red Hat’s
business then, ultimately, Red Hat won’t be around,” Dargo says.
“Is this their plan, to get Red Hat’s valuation low enough to
acquire them?”
Billy Marshall, chief executive of Linux appliance vendor rPath — and a
former executive at Red Hat — says there are “many unanswered
technical questions. Oracle claims they are going to follow the Red Hat
maintenance stream, but they also claim they are going to issue patches to
customers independent of Red Hat,” he says in his blog. “When
Oracle patches a system for a customer, and Red Hat subsequently provides a
patch that conflicts with the Oracle approach, how will the conflict be
resolved?”
Winston Damarillo, head of open-source vendor Simula Lab, calls Oracle’s
announcement “a pretty disruptive move” that has exposed the
inherent vulnerability of the dual-licensing model used by Red Hat and many
other open source companies such as Novell and MySQL.
That model, popularised by the General Public Licence (GPL), requires vendors
to offer their products in full for free in the hope of enticing users, mostly
businesses, to sign up for support and maintenance contracts. Damarillo,
founder of Gluecode Software, an open source application server maker owned by
IBM and which competes with application servers from both Red Hat and Oracle,
says the GPL makes it easy for competitors such as Oracle to invade open source
providers’ turf.
“With GPL, all of your IP [intellectual property] is taken away,”
Damarillo says. He believes that Oracle’s move will encourage many open
source vendors to move to a dual-distribution model, in which they offer a free
core software product and charge for support and for proprietary add-ons like
developer tools or extra security.
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