Posted on 10/27/2006 3:42:14 PM PDT by DesScorp
Linux leader Red Hat’s stock price recovered slightly Friday, but its market value has still dropped 30% since Oracle announced on Wednesday that it will offer lower-cost support of its applications running on Red Hat.
(Excerpt) Read more at networkworld.com ...
However, Oracle did exactly that with PeopleSoft, by announcing a hostile takeover a price significantly below the going price at the time, and saying if they suceeded they would discontinue PeopleSoft's products.
I still don't know how Larry pulled that one off.
It hasn't "continued" its plunge if it has recovered since yesterday. The title is misleading.
Actually most of the linux crowd didn't expect this, linux hacker N3WBI3 created a thread on FR just a week or so ago entitled There is no Oracle Linux. Ellison however had already made it clear months ago that his intent was to make a free and apparently legal copy of Red Hat instead of wasting his money buying some other less popular offshoot.
Looks to me like Oracle is trying to drive the stock price down greatly, then simply buy Red Hat on the cheap.
Possible, if Red Hat's customers all abandon it for this and other various reasons, which probably won't actually happen, as the internet is alive with Red Hat defenders this week, chastising Oracle for simply doing what the GPL license they so lovingly support is designed to do - allow someone else to ripoff your intellectual property and drive the cost to acquire it further down to zero.
Ellison's comments are pretty much spot on, Linux has recently stagnated, and he's fully allowed by the community worshiped GPL license to make free copies of competitors products, so he's going to try to revive it again, what he didn't admit to are his obvious aspirations to take on Microsoft with a complete top to bottom software stack which hasn't so far worked for anyone. And while his company does bring a huge presence and capability into the operating system market, the GPL landscape will remain a full of landmines that have already damaged peripheral contributors like IBM, who to their credit were wise enough to pass on this opportunity and left it to someone else to risk.
End result is someone else will now try to make a living on free software, but probably won't have too good a go since the landscape is already extremely fractured, and littered with those that tried and then suffered immensely for it, Red Hat itself now being a victim, although possibly not fatally, they'll probably just start limping around severly like the other linux companies on the constant verge of bankruptcy, like Novell, Linspire, Xandros, Mandrake, etc.
Obviously because it wasn't en vogue to criticize Oracle over anything, Microsoft has been the one everyone loved to blast in the software world, often rightfully so. If however Ellison succeeds, and again begins to approach Gates as the world's richest man again, as he did back several years ago when Gates started giving his billions away to charity, expect the media microscope to be pointed at Larry, and the shrewd moves he made to get back to the top, so maybe he feels guilty enough to give his billions away too.
I don't expect that though, this will probably prove to be a mistake for Oracle, trying to intermingle their extremely expensive proprietary products with the products of free software fanatics like Richard Stallman could be a disaster for those high margins he has in his other software products. We'll know if Larry really does mean business if he does actually wrest control of Linux away from the radicals, re-writing or replacing the GNU environment and casting Stallman's loons away forever. To "Appleize" Linux, will be his best chance.
Red Hat is a high beta stock, they always have been, the have been as high as 150$ a share and as low as 3$ a share in the past seven years. In the past..
Indeed. Seems to me that Oracle spends more time trying to figure out a way =not= to support you. We're running some Oracle Financials at work, and they have an "apache" interface to some of their stuff. In order for Oracle to "support" Apache, you have to use exactly their specific Apache that comes bundled on the Oracle install media. You wouldn't believe how long a directory tree you have to traverse in order to just get to the httpd.conf file. That, and the fact that the only way to install it scatters all kinds of crud all over your disk. I spent an afternoon one day weeding out unneeded stuff from their "apache" installation, and finally just gave up because it was just so much stuff.
I've heard horror stories from our oracle group about them not even wanting to talk with you until after x,y,and z patches had been installed even though the patches have nothing to do with the problems at hand.
Not impressed with it am I.
Thats too bad my Oracle DBA came to me the other day asking to start using this on DEV with the hopes of prod but if its going to be a pain to support I am going to have to see some real benefit to it.
I've heard horror stories from our oracle group about them not even wanting to talk with you until after x,y,and z patches had been installed even though the patches have nothing to do with the problems at hand.
Ive got one more for you, I had a pseries box sliced up into a few partitions one of which was running RHEL4(Power). OS was on, x server running ready to do the install right? wrong! After applying a few dozen patches the thing still did not work and *then* they looked at my hardware setup and told me unless there was a true graphics card on the system you cant use the gui setup (which is in and of itself insane). I lost 16 man hours applying patches!
When you do the install, check out how much disk space it is eating. Granted, these days people think that disk space is cheap, but for those of my servers that aren't SAN connected, it's not really as cheap as we'd like. I've got a few servers our there that do real work 24/7 that have less total disk space on them than my laptop. Come to think about it, my V100s have less ram than my laptop too. :-)
Speaking of V100s, if you want to see something completely off-topic, but really sad, check this out... from a "top" output...
load averages: 12.92, 21.88, 22.79 08:48:05
133 processes: 121 sleeping, 10 running, 1 stopped, 1 on cpu
CPU states: 1.5% idle, 89.8% user, 8.8% kernel, 0.0% iowait, 0.0% swap
Memory: 1024M real, 201M free, 1003M swap in use, 7.4G swap free
Check out the insane load averages. This box has been up for 378 days, and has pretty much been beaten up like this the whole time.
And Red Hat recently purchased JBoss, I wonder will happen there.
The Jboss purchase is probabally what has spurred Oracle to do this. We are talking about moving from Weblogic to JBoss but I really dont see it happening, too much recompiling of Java code and testing..
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