News associated with Oracles commitment to Linux

 Oracle, Red Hat spar over Linux, Sep 26, 2008

It was nearly two years ago at the 2006 Oracle OpenWorld conference that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled a plan to have Oracle provide support to Red Hat's own Linux customers.

The large magazine publisher Bonnier Corp. switched its database operating system from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 to Oracle Enterprise Linux to get better support, and to boot it saved money.

One Oracle exec said there should be only one Linux distribution — Red Hat — and claimed there will be no fragmentation of that code base.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is extending the Red Hat battlefield to the channel with an extension to Oracle's longstanding alliance with IT reseller CDW.

To Michael Prince, CTO at Burlington Coat Factory, Oracle on Linux is a good idea. "We run all the Oracle we can under Linux," he says. When it comes to Linux technical support, however, he turns to IBM.

As I talked to Wim Coekaerts, VP of Linux engineering at Oracle, about "Unbreakable Linux," a gap emerged between what he was saying and what Red Hat's product management director, Joel Berman, was saying. Riders of Linux's impressive upsurge are advised to "mind the gap" and try not to fall into it.

It's great to be king (aka "Oracle"), but apparently the peasants are secretly in revolt. According to a survey of the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) [PDF], open source adoption is rampant within the rank-and-file of Oracle users...including widespread adoption of MySQL.

First, let's make this clear. Oracle Unbreakable Linux was, is now and is for the foreseeable future going to be based on Red Hat's Red Hat Enterprise Linux codebase. It is not, however, going to be simply RHEL's twin in every way.

Oracle has announced the availability of its Oracle Database 11g on the Linux platform and, at the same time, released new capabilities for its existing 11g Enterprise Edition offering.

Oracle is using LinuxWorld to try and calm concerns its Enterprise Linux and Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) will fork Red Hat and fragment the Linux market.

I'll play Nostradamus and predict that Oracle will not buy Red Hat. Oracle may buy BEA. Here's why...

Oracle has announced the first big-name software vendor to support its Unbreakable Linux support program with the news that Symantec is certifying its Veritas software to Oracle Enterprise Linux.

Melbourne company Opes Prime Stockbroking told ZDNet Australia that in the weeks following its announcement to adopt Oracle Linux, upset Linux enthusiasts phoned, e-mailed and wrote about the company online to complain at the decision.

How much money changed hands is not known, and won't be. In fact, it's completely unclear from the language used in the press release that anyone is actually using Oracle Linux at all.

Oracle has licensed patents of the Open Invention Network, a group seeking to give open-source allies some clout in an intellectual property realm that favors the incumbent proprietary software powers.

"My, but Oracle is cheeky to launch this lawsuit so soon after its (apparently failing) attempts to pilfer Red Hat's support revenues."

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said on his company's Q3 2007 conference call today that Oracle has displaced Red Hat at Yahoo. Officials at both Red Hat and Yahoo, however, see it differently.

Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison announced the company's first prominent Linux customer Tuesday: Yahoo. But Red Hat hasn't been pushed aside at the Internet company.

Oracle has gotten off to a "very strong start" with its support program for users of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, according to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

Oracle Corp. promised to take the Linux software world by storm last October, but the major expansion by one of the world's largest software companies so far has failed to show momentum.

As I look at the situation, it becomes ever clearer to me that Unbreakable Linux is really not a serious business operating system offering. It's simply Oracle's attempt to break Red Hat.

On Tuesday, Unisys plans to announce an expansion of its relationship with Oracle to move mainframe and Unix deployments over to Linux and SOA.

Several Oracle solution providers said most of their Oracle customers are moving to Linux or are new customers requesting Linux implementations.

IT managers running Red Hat Linux should think carefully before making the switch to Unbreakable Linux, the new Linux distribution that Oracle Corp. announced last month.

Oracle’s announcement of providing support on Red Hat Linux is a clear indication that Linux has arrived. Linux, which started out as a hobby among some engineers, is today enterprise-ready and important enough for Oracle to provide support.

Despite such concrete turns in the Linux market, Oracle's support plan continues to be more bluster than muster, according to Mark Shuttleworth, whose company Canonical oversees Ubuntu Linux.

... this week, members of the influential CentOS community voiced strong pessimism over Oracle Linux.

Red Hat users should carry out compatibility tests of Oracle’s Linux set-up because it offers a “more complete” support package, analyst firm Gartner has urged.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison fired a broadside at Red Hat on Wednesday. But now that some of the smoke has cleared, it appears some cannonballs went wide of the mark.

Let's clear something up right away: Larry Ellison's blockbuster announcement earlier this week wasn't meant to choke the life out of the open-source movement.

By doing this, Oracle not only wounds Red Hat, it serves notice to all the Linux businesses -- Novell, Mandriva, Linspire, etc. -- that a giant company can come along, and sweep their work and business plan away from them in a minute.

Don't call it Oracle Linux! The database vendor won't be packaging its own distribution of the open source OS, but Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced at Oracle OpenWorld this afternoon that his company will be offering full support for Linux under a new "Unbreakable Linux" campaign.

Just before the weekend, Network World's Jennifer Mears connected a bunch of dots that make it seem like it isn't a question of if, but rather, just when Oracle announces that it will offer a soup-to-nuts stack of software that not only includes the Linux operating systems, but one that comes from Ubuntu.

The most likely development to expect is that Oracle will certify or support the use of Oracle on Ubuntu Linux.

Oracle could finally announce long-mooted plans for a software stack by adding a branded version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution to its database, application server and tools at the Oracle OpenWorld conference that opens on 22 October in San Francisco.

Wall Street continues to drool over the idea of Oracle producing its own line of Linux software for reasons unclear to us.

Repeat after me: "There is no Oracle Linux." I don't care how many times you hear stock analysts say that Oracle is about to launch its own Linux. It's just not going to happen.

When Oracle releases Siebel 8 later this year, the venerable CRM application will, for the first time, run on Linux servers.

Fresh off an investor tour, Marc Fleury, the general manager of Red Hat's JBoss division, argued that talk of Oracle offering its own Linux distribution is more speculation than reality.

Open source software (OSS) has made big inroads with Oracle customers in recent years, but old concerns over security and technical support die hard, a new Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) member survey finds.

Larry Ellison has stirred up the Linux market again, sparking speculation Oracle may start shipping a cut-price version of Red Hat

Oracle is looking at taking business away from Linux distributor Red Hat by offering support for its product, its CEO declared last month.

Oracle Corp. building or buying its own Linux stack offers possibilities that would allow the company to compete with established open-source market leaders Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell SUSE Linux, according to an analyst.

Oracle is catering to the Linux-leery, announcing June 12 the Oracle Validated Configuration program to provide pre-tested architectures for running Oracle on Linux.

Oracle has been running roughshod over the enterprise-software world of late, winning gobs of market share by buying up the competition in an $18 billion acquisition spree.

Linux will become the dominant OS for Oracle databases by 2007, displacing Solaris, according to a new survey from the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG). But just by a smidge -- 44 percent will run on Linux by then, versus 43 percent on Solaris.

A senior Oracle executive has backed the reasoning behind the software vendor's mooted move into the operating system sphere and illustrated the depth of chief executive Larry Ellison's allegiance to Linux.

Contrary to Larry Ellison's apparent desire to control Linux, IBM prefers to have at least two independent Linux distributors serving corporate customers, an IBM executive said on Wednesday.

Larry Ellison told the Financial Times this week that he was thinking of doing a Linux 'distro" (the term for individual variants -- short for distribution) to support the Oracle database. RedHat stock immediately took a hit.

As rumors swirl about Oracle's desire to buy a Linux distribution, some might wonder just how much money the company makes from its Linux pursuits.

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