Oracle's Linux

It's been pretty quiet lately on Oracle's Linux. There was a lot of noise when Oracle first announced that they were going to undercut Red Hat's price for support of Red Hat's distribution of Linux. I wrote a blog about it called Bullshit where I challenged Oracle's stated reasons for doing such a move.

Pretty soon, on March 20th, Oracle will be making their quarterly revenue announcement. I expect that Oracle will announce a number of customers who have chosen to go with their new Unbreakable Linux support and replace Red Hat support with Oracle's own.

This shouldn't surprise anyone and shouldn't cause discomfort for anyone either. What you are likely to find in their list are large Oracle customers who are consolidating their support. My guess is that Oracle is offering aggressive incentives to these customers. Perhaps Oracle is offering an additional discount on their license or support costs to the customer in exchange for switching to Oracle.

Will it be 10, 100, 1000 new customers? I expect the number will be relatively small in the grand scheme of things but new customers will most assuredly be there. No one should take this as surprising news.

What still baffles me, though, is why doesn't Oracle just go ahead and call it a unique distribution?