Red Herring: Can Red Hat Survive?
“Oracle’s bid to steal business away from Red Hat has thrust the
world’s largest Linux software distributor into an extremely
challenging position. It might even signal the beginning of the end
for Red Hat, industry analysts and insiders said.“Red Hat’s shared tumbled 25 percent Thursday after Oracle, the
giant database software company, said it would offer support
services for Red Hat’s open source Linux software–at half the
price Red Hat currently charges…”
Linux-Watch: What to Make of Oracle vs. Red Hat?
“On the other hand, Kevin Carmony, Linspire Inc.’s CEO thinks
the market is over-reacting to Oracle’s move. After all, Carmony
said, ‘Since when has Oracle been interested in saving IT
departments’ money? Since when has Oracle been known for offering
quality support? This news is a bit like Hershey’s saying they are
going into the health food business. Buyer beware.’“Carmony then backed up his claims with some facts. ‘For the
last two years, Red Hat has topped the CIO Insight [vendor value]
Survey,’ he said. ‘Where is Oracle? This year they were at #39!
This is even worse than Microsoft at #31. Oracle’s 39th spot is
down from their previously sad showings at #28 and #30, for the
prior two years…'”
Ars Technica: Red Hat Responds to Oracle Announcement: Delusion
or Damage Control?
“If Red Hat continues to take a conciliatory position and
refuses to adjust its pricing to compensate for a more competitive
market, the company doesn’t have much of a chance. Refusing to
acknowledge that Oracle is a competitor is a critical error in
judgment, and Red Hat senior vice president Tim Yeaton’s latest
comments sound like delusions or a shoddy attempt at damage
control: ‘It would certainly have been easier had [Oracle] not made
this announcement, but there are a lot of things that actually will
be positive for us,’ Yeaton told eWEEK.“How will this end if Red Hat doesn’t wake up and take control
of the situation…?”
ITBusiness.ca: Red Hat’s Black Hat?
“To suggest Oracle is trying to shut down Red Hat is ludicrous.
Larry Ellison doesn’t care that Red Hat bought JBoss, an open
source database that is a long way from posing a serious threat to
10g or any of the other large databases. The question surrounding
Oracle has been whether, given the advantages of having access to
OS code via Linux, the company would come out with its own
distribution. Wisely, Oracle has decided it would be much easier to
simply support the most popular distribution on the market. There
was no need to reinvent this wheel when Red Hat has been spinning
it successfully for years…”
Krishwords: Oracle-Redhat Controversy is Just Ugly Capitalism
and It May Not be the End of Red Hat
[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for this
link. ]
“Few days back Oracle CEO Larry Ellison announced in Oracleworld
that the company will offer support to Redhat Enterprise Linux for
half the cost of Redhat’s offering. This sent shockwaves across the
techbiz community and Redhat’s shares went tumbling down 30% (the
shares had recovered a little bit since then). Pundits were busy
wondering if this is the end of Redhat and whether it can fight
back. Some of the media outlets, who owe their existence to
companies creating proprietary software, were happily claiming that
this event has exposed the inherent limitation of open source
licenses. This claim is plain rubbish. This event has only exposed
the ugly side of capitalism and it has nothing to do with open
source or its licenses…”