TAG | Unbreakable Linux support - Oracle's claim |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 29 January 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 2 And, he said, being interested in spreading the use of open source software as far and wide as possible within the business community, he could do much more at Oracle than he could have achieved at Red Hat. (To be true, there were some among the audience who smiled cynically when he said this.) Oracle only caters to the business customer. The "unbreakable" bit constitutes the three levels of support which the company offers - and with its brand, its presence in 145 countries and the ability to support 27 languages, it dwarfs any other company by miles. The prices which Oracle cites are significantly lower than what Sun Microsystems does for the Oracle-Solaris combination. Hence, Oracle could justly be accused of trying to woo customers away from not only Red Hat but from Sun as well. It was thus predictable that Owenby had to field a question on whether Oracle was not in danger of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs - in other words, Oracle gets its software from Red Hat and it does not make sense to compete against this vendor. (As one member of the audience pointed out, this was a similar question that Ubuntu had faced with regard to Debian from which it is derived.) To this, Owenby's response was that Oracle was lowering the entry point to Linux in the enterprise - and that was all the company was interested in doing. Of course, there are a number of ways in which Oracle gives back to the commmunity - through hiring people involved in upstream development, patches, and so on. To a question as to why Oracle did not support Debian, Owenby had a stock response - Oracle's customers were not asking for Debian.
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