Oracle Urges Red Hat To Give Away Its Product

“Coekaerts volunteered that observation in an interview on how
Oracle was faring with its “Unbreakable Linux” support program and
its Oracle Enterprise Linux distribution. The latter is actually
Red Hat Enterprise Linux with the logos and trademarks removed. Far
from being a value-added distribution, Oracle strives to keep it as
close to the original Red Hat version as possible, Coekaerts said.
Otherwise, the two systems could diverge, to the confusion of those
Oracle customers who are Red Hat customers as well. “Oracle
Enterprise Linux is literally an exact replica of Red Hat Linux. We
have no interest in forking the [Red Hat] product,” said Coekaerts,
Oracle’s VP of Linux and virtualization engineering, in an
interview Thursday. Oracle doesn’t even perform optimizations on
its own Linux to get the database to run faster on it…

“Red Hat makes its frequently released Fedora Linux available
for free download, but it asks customers to buy a subscription
before downloading the more heavily tested and certified Red Hat
Enterprise Linux. There would be more migrations from Unix database
servers to Linux if Red Hat made its product available for free,
Coekaerts predicted.”

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