Comments on: Oracle supports RedHat - Not what you think

By: Felix Enescu

Felix Enescu — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 19:41:24 +0000

I am afraid that in corporate for critical applications only distros with commercial service will do. Commercial as in big boys
In my case I use RedHat for company ERP (Oracle e-Business Suite). It is posible to switch OUL at least for this application.

By: ITist

ITist — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 13:32:47 +0000

In my view it’s not dangerous at all to say “Red Hat has Fedora”. Of course, “has” != “own” , but (main) “sponsor” (”Fedora Project, sponsored by Red Hat“) or even “Fedora is a trademark of Red Hat, Inc.”. As I said, I see this as “Red Hat has Fedora” (+ CentOS, another community RedHat based Linux).

On the other hand, if you brought this into discussion, is also correct to say “Linus have copyrighted Linux”. Of course, he doesn’t “own” Linux entirely, but has one most important part of it: its name (besides other things, like control over kernel).

Back to OUL, I even didn’t find its licence (didn’t look hard) at Oracle.com. My question is: how successful are commercial-only Linux distros, if any? (I don’t know such distros, but I’m not an Linux expert) I think their use are very limited, and so will happen with Oracle, too, in my opinion.

By: Felix Enescu

Felix Enescu — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 08:36:08 +0000

It’s a dangerous approach to say things like „Red Hat has Fedora” or even Linus have Linux. GPL ensure that if I don’t like what RedHat, or Oracle, or even Linus is doing I can take that piece of software and do whatever I want with it.

PS: Let’s avoid the discussion on “reward society”, aversion to fork, etc. ESR put it much better (http://catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/homesteading/)

By: ITist

ITist — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 15:00:57 +0000

Only time will tell us if Oracle Unbreakable Linux (OUL) is a success or not. My thought is that they will fail. Whatever is open-source you have to discuss about community too, not only business. Red Hat have Fedora (+ CentOS), what would be free, community version of OUL?
Then, Oracle sees only Red Hat, but there are other big players in Linux world. What about Novell Suse Enterprise Linux, half the price of OUL?
There are other issues here, I think, so simply said, I don’t think this would be e big break, just a small foot in open-source world, trying to monetize it. We’ll see.