Tux Watch

TuxWatch.com Exclusive: I have been continuously analysing the various deals, new product launches and set backs of the Proprietary and FOSS industries globally and from my standpoint, the largest blooper for the year 2006 in corporate deals was the Microvell (Microsoft and Novell) deal whereas the grand winners of the corporate world deals are both Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux Support Programme and RedHat Linux.

Microvell Deal: The Microsoft and Novell deal has done a couple of things for both the Proprietary and FOSS worlds. First it shocked both the

Proprietary and FOSS world corporations and users. Now Proprietary world companies are thinking about exploring FOSS options but to their dismay, the GPLv3 may knock them off in their footsteps and leave them to play around with code licensed under the GPLv2. As for the FOSS advocates and leaders worldwide, a majority of them have signed the Bruce Perens’ Petition call [here] with over 3191 people have adding their signatures to the document [here] and many have already sent open letters to Novell that they will be terminating contracts with Novell [here], this was something that the community was already anticipating.

What Novell may have or have not realized before this deal was that it was on the verge of creating a whole new generation of FOSS products that were more and more acceptable by end-users worldwide and before Novell could continue to lead and drive more customers to both its Linux products and FOSS apps, Microsoft intercepted it and Novell fell for it creating distrust from the FOSS community that was originally building products for Novell. Jeremy’s resignation (SAMBA Project) is a prime example of this possibility.

All time Winners! The all time winners for the year 2006 are both Oracle Corporation and RedHat. How, it is very plain and simple. Oracle has offered support for its RDBMS and Apps running on the RedHat Enterprise Linux *RHEL platform not any other Linux OS platform thus this clearly means Oracle is not releasing a new operation system and is offering its Oracle configuration and support for its configuration on RHEL. This means that its support will only be valid for RHEL platforms and that non-RHEL compliant products from the rest of the market will possibly not recieve support from Oracle.

The move made by Oracle was based upon a number of critical facts that it had recieved calls from its customers that Red Hat was not providing adequate support or they were not satisfied with RHEL support for Oracle. I believe this to be a lame excuse, still it has had a great impact on the market. Why I would consider this as a lame excuse is because for any company that is growing with an increase in its customer base and market outreach, so does the number of incidents and time to respond to them.

Time for Red Hat to wakeup? Not really! If we look at how things are moving for RedHat in particular, Red Hat has been concentrating alot on Fedora. The community Linux to commercial Linux or vice versa has been quite famous but Fedora is one of those Linux operating system distros that is being continuously updated round the clock, even more frequent then other famous distros like Ubuntu or Open Suse. Oracle on the other hand is introducing newer forms of support for example, Oracle is offering maintenance without support, end-users only get patches which is not offered by RedHat. Oracle is also offering a binary release for free (gratis). Anyhoo, Red Hat has responded to Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux with its Unfakeable Linux Programme [here].

I would also believe that Red Hat is still getting more and more advertising because of all this RHEL discussion by both Oracle and the Microvell deal so in the end both Oracle and Red Hat have been winning whereas all I read about Microsoft last year were delays in launching Vista and the good things this year (2007) include an upcomming release of Ubuntu Linux Desktop supporting 3D desktop features, so much for Novell Suse and Microsoft Vista 3D initiatives. Oracle talking about RHEL has proved that Red Hat products are leading the market and will continue to lead since the only software being offered by Oracle as open source and support for it is RHEL thus Red Hat’s enterprise platform continues to lead the market.

More to continue from TuxWatch.com on this.