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RedHat's going to have a tough time
(www.oracle.com)
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What I just read: "Companies coming together to develop a new better Enterprise Linux solution with standards, etc." which seems like a good thing.
What I also just read: "A bunch of companies that couldn't create or maintain a Linux distribution on their own are joining forces to attempt to create a clone of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux offering." which isn't a good thing.
Serious question: Why would I get support from any of these companies? Don't get me wrong, Oracle and Suse have very talented and valuable employees (I don't know enough about CIQ but I'm sure they have smart people over there too!) that contribute to open source communities. But the message I just read is "Our current offerings are all inferior to RHEL".
That is not a message to be celebrated.
Why is anyone celebrating this? If I were employed at any of these companies I would be worried about the future of my job. Am I missing something obvious?
I understand what you're saying and I don't think you're missing anything. SLES, CIQ, Oracle are trying to come out as winners here but they're cutting off their noses to spite their own faces. I can't understand why any of these companies thought that this was a good message to send to anyone.
Can you imagine being in SLES sales? "Yeah, we attempt to clone our competitor's product and we promise you that we can support it better than they can."
SUSE has sort of already been making that claim for some time with SUSE Liberty Linux. Supporting a clone isn’t a big stretch. I don’t think they plan on selling it though, they had already said it would be an independent project.
SLES sales: "You really trust IBM not to bend you over? Yes, we accept Visa or Mastercard."