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I find it funny that some people are simply assuming that the big, bad wolf Oracle is going to somehow sweep Red Hat aside, either buying them out or slowly strangling them. Some of the people assuming this are so called analysts getting paid money to write drivel. Feel free to throw some my way!

Oracle is a multi billion dollar database company selling expensive database software to keep them a multi billion dollar database company. That's it. That's why they're at real risk from cheap competitors like MySQL and Postres in all but the highest end niches. Red Hat, on the other hand, produce an OS and are moving forwards to use other open source software in directory services and the J2EE world. Although Oracle and Red Hat were originally bedfellows, this relationship seems to have died when Oracle realised that Red Hat, sooner or later, were going to encroach on their turf with Postgres as an official RH database. The aquisition of JBoss merely cemented that fear of encroachment further with Oracle.

So, would you rather have a company like Red Hat who knows how to produce an open source OS they see value in, along with supporting a cheap and well proven open source stack on top of it of directory services, Java software and also a Red Hat database (Postgres)? Or would you rather have a company like Oracle peddle an OS to you that they really see as worthless in order that they can force their expensive, limited, and not very good, proprietary software on you at a later time, getting you into a locked in licensing mess in the long-run?

I know what I'd choose. Oracle has a very, very, very poor track record of producing any software that is not database related, and even then they've been poor and very slow in patching their own core software. They're also woefully inept at developing and supporting anything operating system related, because when Oracle does it all it is is a gimmic. Remember the Network Computer? You simply cannot trust them. Supporting an OS stack like Red Hat does takes time, effort, resources and good management who see value in it.

This is merely Oracle's feeble attempts at delaying the inevitable, namely that their database software is going to be forced out over time by MySQL, and especially Postgres when it becomes 'Red Hat Database' and is given the official seal of support by RH. This is not any sort of offensive against Red Hat by Oracle. It's the same panic we've seen going on for some years, in the same manner as that pathetically useless takeover of Sleepycat.

This is an unbreakable flop.

Edited 2006-10-27 23:27

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