[Discuss] Oracle Linux, going after CentOs

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

On 07/24/2012 08:42 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On 07/24/2012 07:48 AM, David Kramer wrote:
>> On 07/23/2012 01:07 PM, Guy Gold wrote:
>>> They don't really leave much room for questions :)
>>>
>>> http://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/
>>>
>>> (I am , in no way, affiliated with Oracle)
>> You know, when your email subject starts with Oracle is going after
>> something, the default assumption is that it's about a law suit ;)
>>
>>
> That would make for an interesting lawsuit :-)
> 
> Basically, I'm wondering why Oracle is actually building their own
> distro. We can speculate that they want to dominate the Linux enterprise
> market.

They're not really building their own distro.  They are doing what
CentOS does, namely distributing a rebranded RHEL.  The difference in
terminology between rebranding and "building your own" lies in their
(both CentOS and Oracle's) stated goal of being fully binary compatible.
 Forgive the pedantic rant, I just don't want to give Oracle any more
credit for doing something constructive than they deserve.

What's really funny about that graph on the page the OP linked is how
silly it is to be bragging about how much faster you are at
incorporating RHEL's updates than CentOS.  Oracle is basically saying:
Redhat are the linux experts, we're just leechers.  But look at how much
better at being a leech we are!  Of course the problem is when the
leecher kills the host, what happens to his upstream supply of patches?

As to why Oracle has a distro in the first place, they likely did this
for a few reasons.  First, they want to own a platform that they can
make optimizations specifically for their database without having to
convince RedHat to do it.  This is evidenced by the fact that the offer
the stock RHEL kernel for full compatibility, but Oracle recommends
their own kernel (that they've added a bunch of stuff to).

Second, they want to be like IBM, be a one-stop shop for all your
support needs (as others have noted from experience, you probably don't
want to be on the receiving end of Oracle support, but that's another
point entirely). To offer their own support, they have to "own" the
platform.

Finally, they want to capture the really high-end market away from
Redhat.  That's why they bought Ksplice, and forcibly ended Ksplice
support for RHEL (and took down the source code repositories).  Most
people don't care about zero-downtime kernel updates except for some
really high-end customers that would likely pay through the nose for it.

Matt