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Oracle Linux Rumours Continue
Rumours began in the Spring around Oracle delivering it's own Linux distribution and resurfaced this week during LinuxWorld on Jeff Nolan's blog, where the rumour suggests the Oracle version will be based on Red Hat's distro. The fun bit was Jeff's update to his entry:
UPDATE: Oracle’s investor relations group is now saying that the announcement will be pushed out possibly past OpenWorld in October.
So apparently Oracle remains coy about the rumour. My opinions haven't changed from the blog posting I wrote in the Spring. Oracle taking on its own distro rather than continuing to contribute to the community is engineering inefficient and a waste of shareholder money, and it doesn't solve the customer's problem any better. If Red Hat is unreasonably behind in delivering the platform to Oracle's needs, they could better invest in the relationship than in undertaking to take on their own distro based on Red Hat.
Dave Gynn and I were part of an email discussion, and he gave me permission to share his ideas as well:
Creating a distro based on Red Hat ties Oracle to Red Hat's release cycle and roadmap. It will be difficult and expensive to offer support for Red Hat that can compete with Red Hat's own Red Hat Network offering. Oracle is just an expensive middleman whose value is unclear.
If anything, this only makes Red Hat stronger. Oracle will be required by the GPL to make available any modifications they make. So the Red Hat codebase will benefit. Developers will continue to target Red Hat since applications that work on Red Hat should work on Oracle's derivative distro.
With their own distro, Oracle will neglect support for the Oracle database and other applications on other Linux distros. Open source databases like Postgres and MySQL which run well on all distros will continue to be a more flexible solution.
There is no reason to believe that an Oracle Linux distribution would be compelling or successful.
Well said. Oracle is still very like some other software companies, praising open source on the one hand around Linux, but with contradictory rhetoric on the other hand around such things as Postgres and EnterpriseDB and MySQL. Oracle Linux, or Oracle Red Hat Linux, would be bad business for Oracle.
The Spring posts:
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