Blog: Pete Loshin: Oracle to Red Hat: "Drop Dead"

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Oracle to Red Hat: "Drop Dead"

Well, the Oracle Linux shoe has finally dropped: Larry Ellison announced Oracle Unbreakable Linux in his closing keynote address at OpenWorld conference in San Francisco yesterday afternoon.

No more speculation about Oracle offering its own open source OS (see, More Rumors about Oracle Linux and
Oracle to Microsoft: Drop Dead?).

It's what open source naysayers have been warning about for years: what happens when a big commercial software company decides to sell their open source competitor's software? As I wrote in Enterprising Linux in July, Red Hat already tolerates the re-use of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in projects like CentOS and Scientific Linux.

Oracle is going to re-package RHEL, stripping off the Red Hat-proprietary stuff (same as CentOS et al do), and sell support--which is EXACTLY what Red Hat sells. And at a discount: current Oracle customers can get a free trial until January 31, 2007, and everyone gets a 50% discount on the product until then. The new Oracle product is already priced lower than Red Hat's offering.

Red Hat has to be worried now that one of the world's biggest and baddest software companies announced plans to eat Red Hat's lunch. Red Hat shares dropped almost by a quarter in early trading as the analysts raced to downgrade Red Hat.

Red Hat won't roll over, though. They've already posted a response to Oracle's move, UNFAKEABLE LINUX. It's a must-read for anyone considering Oracle's offering.

Surprisingly, though, in the long run this may prove a boon for Red Hat. I'm not just playing the over-confident open source cheerleader here; for now, I'll just suggest some possibilities:

Oracle's move gives a huge credibility boost to Linux in general, and RHEL in particular, now that a major mainstream software player supports it.
Red Hat, facing a serious competitor in the Linux support business, must get very serious about adding more value to their own products.
Oracle's customers who wouldn't previously have considered Red Hat as a vendor will now be forced to consider Red Hat as Oracle starts selling RHEL support.

There's more, and I'll have more to say about this development in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, let me know what you think might become of Red Hat, Oracle and Linux in general.

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