that is the question indeed
james: i am indeed very interested to see what’s next in the oft up and down Oracle/Sun relationship.

Thank you for sharing this story with me !

and the Sun angle is an interesting one… the sun oracle relationship surely just took a turn for the worse again, if Oracle is an OS vendor.

As for Linux and Open Source - I think this is a HUGE boost. Just b/c Oracle hasn’t been “so involved” in the community _yet_ doesn’t mean it will not be. Heck, on the same day Oracle became FSG Platinum - signaling intent to collaborate. They’re just getting into the game as a Linux supporter (ahem… distro). It will take time before we understand their true community potential. I think Larry has much grander plans than just sinking RH’s stock.

Remember, in Larry’s FT interview he also said, “because Red Hat is to some degree our way of competing with Microsoft down at the core level” and “now that Red Hat has bought JBoss and competes with us in middleware, we have to relook at the relationship”

When you look back at the FT interview, Larry pretty much scripted this entire move. Now the question is - what gems of “the next move” were scripted in there as well.

“From a business perspective, I just don’t think it is going to matter how much Oracle gives back, etc.”

i seriously disagree. even Oracle has made a point of emphasizing the ways they intend to give back to both the Red Hat (specifically) and Linux (generally) communities. they’re doing that for a reason - that reason being that being widely perceived as a firm that takes advantage of open source does them no good, and a lot of damage.

“If I was already an Oracle customer running Linux, I would seriously considering switching my distro support over to them as well. It is just one less vendor to deal with.”

that’s almost certainly their logic as well. but what if you’re already an Oracle/Peoplesoft/Financials customer. you really want them owning your OS relationship as well, when at this point you have no real guarantee as to whether or not the RHEL software you’re running will *actually* be compatible? maybe, for simplicity’s sake. but you become awfully dependent on them.

“I would be pretty nervous if I was at Red Hat or Novell. It really shows the weakness in their business model.”

both agree and disagree here. as discussed in the piece, i don’t think there’s any question that both of the vendors you mention - and throw in Ubuntu as well - are extraordinarily not happy about this. no debate there.

what i would question is whether or not that reveals an inherent weakness in the business model. forks have been possible - as you point out - forever, yet they rarely happen. why? because they rarely work. i also think this pays short shrift to the inherent advantages in the open source model.

“All they are selling is their name.”

disagree. they’re selling their name *and* a network offering. that’s what’re you’re really buying from Red Hat, and increasingly from MySQL, though the models differ.

“How strong is their brand compared to Oracle?”

depends on the context. is Oracle a bigger brand than Red Hat? sure. is Oracle a bigger brand than Red Hat in the operating system world? not so much. also, the brand can carry with it some liabilities; i *hated* having to price Oracle when i was an SI. hated it.

“RedHat’s stock was crushed today, and I think that is for good reason.”

well, i happen to agree as covered in the piece, but i don’t generally take share price swings as accurate predictions of long term business prospects. Wall St is obsessed with the short term, and almost blind to the long term. i’ll wait and see how this plays out.

“You don’t want to get into a pricing war over a commodity product with Oracle.”

true, but it’s equally true that Oracle would not be terribly eager to see open source make serious inroads upmarket in the database space.

“Larry, might be evil, but he might also be a genius, and I can’t fault him for this move.”

Ellison is a very intelligent guy, no debate there. but he’s also made mistakes (see his network computer efforts). this particular move is certainly brilliant in that its guerilla like ability to use Red Hat’s strengths against it, but i think it’s equally obvious that he has a limited or no understanding of how open source works. whether or not that affects their efforts longer term depends on what importance you attribute to community and some of the so-called soft attributes of open source. an area where you and i differ.

i look forward to seeing who’s right. if i’m wrong, dinner’s on me

I apologize for getting heated over this, but I would be pretty nervous if I was at Red Hat or Novell. It really shows the weakness in their business model. All they are selling is their name. How strong is their brand compared to Oracle?

RedHat’s stock was crushed today, and I think that is for good reason. You don’t want to get into a pricing war over a commodity product with Oracle.

Larry, might be evil, but he might also be a genius, and I can’t fault him for this move.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

what i am saying is that software development these days is about more than just the bits you turn out; it’s about how you interact with the various communities you affect and they in turn interact with you. the logical question is why they should care, if they make money. the answer, in my opinion, is adoption. i’ve made the argument many times (as you know) that technologies are increasingly adopted in bottom up fashion, by individuals and communities. think LAMP, think Eclipse. communities, in other words, matter.

my criticism of Oracle stems from the fact that they seem to be more or less totally oblivious to this aspect of open source. Ellison seems to view open source as nothing more than free code, and i think that’s shortsighted. as many successful commercial open and hybrid source firms prove, open source is about give and take, and so far Oracle seems to be doing a lot more taking than giving. that’s not sustainable longer term.

as for this being indicative of a problem with open source more generally, we’ll see. for every weakness there’s a strength.

Oracle does own Sleepycat, etc, so in some sense they do support the OpenSource community. I think this is a totally logical move for Oracle from a business side.

I can’t see faulting them because the moat around the OpenSource business model, is more like a puddle.

christopher: i think we can agree that Ellison does know what he is doing, and that it’s within his legal right to do so. where we’ll have to agree to disagree is that it’s just about the code; that whatever can be done with open source code should be done. that i fundamentally disagree with, because it ignores the community and the developers that build it.

Did I read that right? It demonstates Ellison’s LACK of understanding? In all due respect, I couldn’t disagree more with that comment more. Ellison knows EXACTLY what he is doing here. The IP is free for the taking, and he is taking. If you release under BSD or even GPL you are allowing folks like Ellison to profit from that IP.

What I’m surprised by is that it has taken so long for everybody to figure this out. RedHat’s business model is based on a house of cards. Just look at CentOS. My OS of choice.