Oracle issues threat to Red Hat support

Stan Beer
Thursday, 26 October 2006 08:58

Your IT - Home IT

Rumours of Oracle releasing its own Linux distribution based on Ubuntu were wrong. However, Oracle has thrown its hat into the Linux support ring with a direct challenge to the leading Linux vendor Red Hat.

In his closing keynote at the San Francisco Oracle OpenWorld conference, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison may have disappointed those who were expecting the unveiling of an Oracle-branded Linux. However, he set open source world abuzz by announcing that Oracle will offer specific support for Red Hat Linux, putting the giant software company in direct competition with Red Hat, whose bread and butter is support for its own distribution.

According to Ellison, the market is crying out for an enterprise level of Red Hat support at a reasonable price. He alluded to the fact that users were dependent on Linux distributors for bug fixes and often had to wait for new versions of the operating system for a fix. Ellison's vision is for Oracle to strengthen Linux by fixing bugs for clients and then making the fix available for the wider Linux community.

The news appears to have gained enthusiastic support among some of the larger vendors in the IT space and spells bad news for Red Hat, which now has active competitor with scale and resources in the Linux support space.

Responding to questions from the audience, Ellison denied that Oracle's move threatens kill Red Hat's business. "This is capitalism. We're competing. We're offering a better product at a lower price," he said.

However, the fact is that six months ago Ellison revealed that he would like Oracle to own the whole software stack, which of course includes an operating system. He also revealed that he had considered acquiring Red Hat but that the company was too expensive and that if Oracle wanted to, it could simply take the Red Hat software and embed it in its own Linux product. The latest move by Oracle could be viewed as a step in that direction.