Oracle's Linux Strategy illustrates Oracles Power in Marketplace
At Oracle World last month, Chief Executive Larry Ellison told thousands of attendees at the Oracle OpenWorld conference last week, "If you are a Red Hat support customer, you can very easily switch from Red Hat support to Oracle support." as reported by CNET. This story has generated a lot of controversy in the Linux camps of the world, and is one of the top story's on digg and Linux Watch.
This direction illustrates the power that Oracle has in the Marketplace. Oracle is doing this to ensure another stable platform for its products, however it comes at the cost of RedHat. How would you feel if you were a developer at RedHat or a contributer to the RedHat distribution. I think one strategy that Oracle could take would be to add resources to both the RedHat and Oracle-Customized RedHat distributions. Oracle could and probably will reduce their Licensing structure for Linux based products in an effort to drive adoption to Linux.
Someone who is in favor of this new Oracle strategy is Dana Gardner at ZDNET who wrote ...
"If Oracle can subsidize the offering of subscription services to an acceptable and open (not too forked) Linux distribution (and these need to happen) through its commercial products' revenues, it will. It was okay for open source service providers to undercut Unix and Windows via their low-cost development and distribution means, right? What's good for the goose …" Follow this link for the complete article
Will current customers really move to Linux ?
For larger Enterprises with Oracle databases, this path needs to be cost effective and supportable. Oracle is trying to bring some credibility to the support side of its products on RedHat, and this may be an good strategy, if they really can provide the support. From a cost perspective, it is almost an even comparison of Hardware and OS choices. You still need to purchase RedHat and a support contract for your products. Hardware cost of Database Platform Intel based servers and Sun Servers are very similar.
So, in my opinion, there is not a compelling reason for Large Enterprise Organizations to move your production database structures to Linux, however this could be a nice strategy for Small and Medium sized businesses.
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