In a word, "no". At least, not to anyone except the obvious competitor.
But I'll get to that later.
Much ink and many pixels have been spilled recently over Oracle's
announcement that it will be providing "their own" Linux distribution.
In particular, what they'll be doing is exactly what CentOS and White Box do: download a stack
of sources from Red Hat, rebuild
them without the branding package, and call it "Oracle Linux".
Here are a few articles from InfoWorld that I came across this morning: "Oracle to push Red Hat from support chair" (yes, Oracle will be
providing their own, paid support), "Oracle-Ubuntu rumor fizzles" (a lot of observers expected Oracle to
simply certify the Ubuntu
distribution), "Oracle
move a worry for Red Hat" (um... yes; maybe), "With friends like these....(Oracle goes after Red Hat)", and finally
this one pointing off to this
entry in Dave Dargo's
blog at Ingres. Dave "was a
longtime Oracle employee and started and ran Oracle's open source program
office", and now works for one of Oracle's open-source competitors.
Dave Dargo is understandably skeptical of Oracle's ability to compete with
RedHat on the basis of support: "There's a survey from CIOInsight [PDF]
that shows Red Hat is the number one vendor for value as rated by CIOs in
2004 and 2005. Where does Oracle fit on that chart? Glad you asked, they
ranked 39 out of 41." But nobody seems to be asking themselves
who Oracle's real target is.
I'll give you a hint: it isn't RedHat. RedHat has a solid number-one
position in enterprise Linux, a solid number-one reputation for support
(even if it's a little slow sometimes), and it's really not very likely
that any of their customers are going to switch, unless they already
want to run an Oracle database server. If they do, they'll be happy
to get their OS and their database from the same vendor, and pay the
additional 5% for the convenience of getting all their support from the
same place. What they get with that support is a guaranteed lack of
fingerpointing. As somebody who once bought a RedHat-based server from
Dell, I can assure you that that's well worth the price.
So who else makes a big marketing noise about being a one-stop shop for
your enterprise database server? Microsoft, of course. That's Oracle's
real target. Microsoft, who can tweak their database server and their OS
kernel to work perfectly together -- or at least get in their competitors'
way when it comes down to running benchmarks. Now Oracle can play that
game. Until now, Oracle couldn't offer an "all your software from one
vendor, guaranteed no fingerpointing, just runs out of the box" solution.
Now they can. It's that simple.
I expect that the impact on RedHat's non-Oracle customers will be minimal.
They'll be hit a little more than other distros, because almost all of
Oracle's customers were already running RHEL. Maybe they'll be hit a lot
more; it's not clear how many of their enterprise customers
weren't running Oracle. But RedHat isn't number one anymore, and
having multiple vendors in the enterprise (high rent) market can only
benefit the Linux market as a whole. Who knows? Maybe it'll convince RH
that they should go back to selling $99 boxed sets like they used to do.
Because if they don't, Oracle will get all that lovely shelf space in
Fry's.
But the hackers will stick to Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora, and
Slackware, and probably won't even notice. The IT guys who just want a
box at home with the same style of config files as their big servers at
work might download Oracle instead of CentOS or White Box. Or might not.
Not a problem. RedHat will lose some customers, but if they go back to
selling boxed sets at retail they won't lose much, if any, off their
bottom line. The big loser, at least if everything goes according to
Oracle's plan, will be Microsoft.
And that's as it should be.