“Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 is now available. Enhancements provide improvements in system reliability, scalability and performance, coupled with support for upcoming system hardware. This release also delivers patches and security updates, while maintaining application compatibility and OEM/ISV certifications.”
http://www.redhat.com/g/rhel/rhel6/more_proofpoint_open_lg.png
RedHat is silly … they try to compete with OUL which is just a rebuild of RHEL, like CentOS or Scientific Linux.
Its like Renault would compete against Dacia … (for thom who does not get it: Renault owns Dacia)
I am now not so surprised why they employ ‘visioners’ like Poettering …
Edited 2011-05-19 13:25 UTC
Uhm, not exactly. This would be like if Renault competing with Ford and Chrysler after Renault released the diagrams for building their cars and the other two started building them.
Oracle and Redhat are two separate companies that sell the same thing under different circumstances. RHEL is sold as a general purpose workstation and server OS, whereas Oracle tends to cater toward higher end enterprises that will deal with rigid support constraints, and then CentOS is for the people that don’t need the support.
Oracle says that if you want to run it under certified VM hypervisors, they will probably only support you if you run Oracle’s hypervisor. If you run Redhat, they are certified under a much larger canopy of vendors. Will OUL run on VMWare or HyperV? Sure, but good luck getting support.
Red Hat probably defines “competitors” to be companies that can interfere with customers paying Red Hat money by convincing those customers to pay those other companies instead. That seems pretty sensible.
Competitors are those that “compete” with you for customer dollars. Customers only have so many dollars and so many needs. Somebody that takes those dollars to meet a need, that you could meet, is your competitor.
Suggesting that companies that offer identical technology are not competitors does seem pretty silly. That seems to be what you are doing.
Considering tha they are sold by two different companies, its not silly or surpising. I can choose my electric company, telephone service, and natural gas supplier. Their products don’t significantly differ from each other and are redibly exchangable they only differ in cost and service.
OUL is not just a rebuild of RHEL anymore. Slowly but surely they are forking. Initially by the kernel, followed by others. OUL is tuned for Oracle to such an extent that RHEL is becoming unsupported for Oracle products.
Both Red Flag Linux and Mandrake/Mandriva started as simple recompiles/forks of Red Hat Linux/Fedora/RHEL but they moved further, much further with time. Some forks track upstream much closer, but OUL will not.
I personally find your Renault/Dacia comparison funny but missing the point. Renault/Dacia (and to some extent Nissan, see Nissan Aprio) are just brands used in a Linksys/Cisco style to better differentiate the markets.
Oracle’s strategy seems to be to provide a 100% Oracle stack (Hardware, Storage, OS, Middleware) and I can’t blame them for doing that as it does wonders for other vendors (think Apple).
They’re not competing based on the OS, they’re competing based on the services built around the OS. Oracle can copy all they want, it’ll just make it that much easier for Red Hat to make a sales pitch.
> Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 is now available […]
…while in the meantime CentOS hasn’t even released 6.0, not to speak of 5.6. I’m accepting bets whether 6.1 will be repackaged before Doomsday next year.
Scientific Linux appears to have taken the mantle of leading RHEL repackage, much the same as CentOS took the mantle from WhiteBox Linux.
It would be good for both projects to ‘join force’ since they want to achieve the same goal, to create more or less a free RHEL clone as much compatible with the ‘original’ as possible.
eh? CentOS 5.6 was released on 08. April 2011
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2011-April/017282…