Episode: 1044
Title: HPR1044: OggCamp11: Oracle Linux
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1044/hpr1044.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 17:53:23

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I'm talking to JWP, one of our own hosts, and you've just come out of a talk given by
yourself, Coles.
It's about Oracle Linux, so how did that go down?
It went pretty well, I stuttered a lot, and so it's, I don't know if it was really good
or not, but we had a lot of questions, and there were some red hat people there that really
like red hat and lots of interaction, lots of interaction with Oracle, I hate it and
everything.
Well, that's, I'm looking forward to seeing the talks, because I'm don't here, I'm
not getting to see any of the talks at all, so they will be available on a separate
feed.
Okay, Ken, you should really talk about this, this is a really interesting device, you're
diverting the attention from yourself, so what topics did you cover in the interview?
What did you cover in the talk?
Well, about, you know, is it evil, did they break the GPL, did, where they're going
to go in three years, will it really matter about any kind of database in five years, things
like that?
Cool.
We're probably going to talk on the talk to the end of this episode.
Okay, great.
Alrighty, enjoy the show.
Hello everyone, I'm John and I'm here to kind of talk about the Oracle and it's, you
know, we've all heard of an evil thing that's come out, you know, it's a lot of access,
quite evil, everything that Oracle does, but actually, it wasn't such an evil move if
you really look at it, why?
So what is it really, it's exactly like you heard on the podcast, it's just a copy
of what it had.
In the moment, the reason that they did it was, Oracle owns an 85% share of the UNIX
database environment on proprietary UNIX system risk, AIX, HPX, some of the data-based
choice.
And it's no different on Linux, with Red Hat or Nobel, whatever they call the catch
main now, it's still 85%, so even though they went to X86 and they get a migration
now, there was a guy with a Hilti bag running around here, Hilti did a great migration,
took them about three years to get the payoff from the migration from the proprietary UNIX
stuff.
And the other reason they did it was because now they bought some, so some sells X86 servers,
so they control the whole stack, so they get the whole support line, and by the way,
they didn't have to develop, they can give support for 50% less than that, but you have
to buy the whole thing from you.
They're not, later as we talk, you'll see that they don't do, if you don't want part
of it, they're not really interested, they don't like it all or nothing.
In the enterprise space, especially with ERP and SAP, to a certain extent, people saw
that they're going to be, they had, for sure they're going to be, sless, they're cheaper
with that unbreakable kernel on the application side, I think it's 60% better benchmark performance,
so then the standard Red Hat kernel.
It's not really, the only thing with that is I say it's unbreakable, but when we benchmarked
it in my workplace, it crashes a lot, so you have to have a bunch of them to keep it
going.
Oracle also brings a lot to the table that in the moment that Red Hat and I'll just say
Sousa, now that I've found the right word, Sousa don't have, like they have ASM, storage
manager, they have Oracle DataGuard, it goes on for text, makes a copy of the database
over a long distance, and currently the cluster inside the Red Hat is just not enough reference
assistance, for an enterprise people, if you have 500 people working on your environment
and you have a database of, it can't be done because you're paying those people whatever
hourly that personnel cost is, plus whatever the customer says, so it can't be done at all,
especially if there's supply chain management systems, it just can't be.
And so it's going to be probably, when I talk to Red Hat, they said it probably in two
or three years, this problem will go away.
And it's more or less about references, like Hilti is their reference that they do
is when they usually visit people in Europe.
Oracle is going to have some real trouble with this, is that more and more companies are
making strategic decisions about their technology, right?
Like, for instance, who their storage provider can be, who their outsourcing partners can
be.
They make that choice up front, right?
This is, we're going to have Red Hat, right?
And, or we're going to have PMC or NetApp or HP or IBM Storage, and that's what we're
going to use for the next six years.
And when customers have made that choice, Oracle doesn't win, they don't have the choice,
the choice really, it's about, like, after that.
But in all other cases, where there's a unit and a database and a migration, Oracle
is quite strong.
As an example of this mix that I was talking about, well, you said your SAP server, and
when you sell it, you say, well, Oracle's support is 50% cheaper than Red Hat, but it's
only supported if you buy the database and the clustering software, right?
Because they won't support Oracle Linux on the application server.
So, almost every customer that I sold to for the last three or four years, they buy
cheap eight Intel or AMD boxes and scale it now.
So they won't pay $500,000 for a proprietary unit system anymore, though, but by a bunch
of little labels and do it that way.
Or two or three really big eight socket Intel boxes and do it that way.
But for sure, for sure, they're not going to give you $1.2 million for application
server, as it's not going to happen.
And so, Oracle won't support that.
So Red Hat has the chance, and Nobel has the chance to sell the low-hanging fruit more
or less and get into the customer that way with that.
Oracle is in a lot of work with Zen, they're a virtual machine that they sell in the enterprise
space, so they pay to Linux Foundation some money to put the hooks back in to the kernel
for Zen.
Somehow, their Oracle VM, when we're in the bench test, is much faster than VMware.
Much faster than almost anything else we've ever seen.
So it's really, really tuned, and I have to add that Oracle will send people to your
place and help you set up all that if you want to do that, so that are real interested
in being with boxes.
Of course, there's a lot of restrictions, and when I say the restrictions, so okay, they
have that great benchmark, and if you buy their Linux and have their database, you can use
their virtual desk technology.
But if you want to use their database with VMware or Zen, just playing from another provider
to get your support from your place else, or KVM, it's Dragonia, what they make you
out there.
It supports steps, and you can't install it, you can't do anything, it's just not supported.
I did sort of evil with the Linux space, and they're not interested in the desktop space
at all, as they gave away an open office thing.
We all heard about that, that was sort of poorly handled with the open office.
They've been pretty hard with Google, with the Java thing, and the Android.
I don't know if you all read about that, that was pretty stressful.
What's going to happen?
I have an entourage, an e-quant on one side, and Android tablet on the other side of
the Android, and I was quite concerned when they did the Java announcement, MySQL, lots
of people use that on the web now, and that's all owned by them now.
It's really, really stressful.
From my company, data cleared are HPUX, non-supportable, so all of our 20,000 HPUX Oracle
database customers have to move now, tell you, a new solution, I just arbitrarily killed
that, right?
The only real space where it's been really interesting is that with SAP, most of the mid-level managers
in Germany there, doing project development there, when they went to school, they used
Sousa, and so that's the development environment there, and so all the Linux appliances, their
business intelligence, this new Anna thing that they're doing, all of the client structures
from there.
It only runs on the Novel product.
Now, as I said before, Red Hat in the moment is really struggling with the cluster, but
in January, they brought out new cluster software, and it's finally a three-disset when you
put it into the server, so your integrator can want to three, put it in with no trouble.
But at the same time, Red Hat has a problem that people, though by two or three support licenses,
there's minimal support from them, but then they have 20 servers that run the Red Hat on
it.
You can't get a full representation of how many exactly Sousa and Novel have, because
it's very easy to clone the applications.
And so, if there is a problem, they call it the vendor and say, hey, I've got this problem.
And that's another problem, is that if you're a customer and you have a storage vendor,
server vendor, an operating system vendor, and a database vendor, and a guy that's doing
backup software, and something goes wrong, you get a lot of deaths.
And so, it's quite, with Oracle, they say, well, when we sold to the server, we sold
to the database, we sold to the high availability stuff, everything's good, we'll make it right.
But if you mix it, it's quite hard, and there's a lot of finger pointing.
So, the, what, you know, how did the market react, right, what were the initial market reactions,
right, how did they do it, right, well, okay, so, you know, the big, among the thing that
is HP got scared, because their whole infrastructure just got, it has a five-year shelf life now.
And so, what happened, the, you know, the CEO of the company, he's from SAP, some Leo's
there, and Leo called SAP, I guess, and SAP bought Sybase, and Sybase has a database company,
they're not really exciting, I mean, but they had some in-memory technology that's pretty
fantastic, and it only runs on Linux, but that's all right, there won't be any Microsoft
or any kind of anything else, and their mobility products for the phones have an in-phone
database, and I don't know if you've seen this thing yet, it's a touchpad, it's a polymer
less, well, that's Linux too, right, and so, there's going to be an interface, so if you're
out selling your beer salesman, everybody drinks beer here, your beer salesman, he pulled
up in his truck, I live in Germany, he pulled up in the truck, and he comes out, and he has
a little pad, and I buy beer, all right, it comes in, well, that automatically goes into
the ERP system now, and they know exactly what kind of beer is on teeth and talk straws
and is needed, and he'll only have that beer in his truck next time, not beer for everybody.
And so, that's what these are going to do, you always see these tablets, but they're
really going to come, and now, your doctor, well, he's going to have one of these two,
all right, it's all going to be home on those, it's not going to be, yeah, this paper thing
will exist anymore in the doctor's office, because you've been going to be out for over
a year, he's going to have one of those for you, all right, and flip, maybe even you'll
have a chip that runs Linux, and you give it to the hospital when you go buy a hospital
I got no idea, but the, so, in response, SAP is going to have this memory database technology,
so in three to four years, we won't even think about it, what people will be saying is,
memory is much faster, I'm running the inside of the machine, and I'm running running,
so it's not going to cost me any money, and so I really don't know what the future is,
it's really as clear as money on this, and it changes radically from month to month,
if you read the support notes that come from all three companies on what they support
and how this is going to happen, what they're doing, it's, I've never seen it, it's like
almost like some kind of mutation movie, all right, well, that pretty much does it for
me, I've got about 11 minutes left, and 11 minutes left, I didn't think I'd take the
old 30 minutes, so, did anybody got anything? Oh, no, I forgot, oh, I got it, oh, I got it,
thank you guys, so you mentioned the opening, obviously, it's possible to purchase Red Hat
support from Oracle, how do Oracle adequately provide support for something that they haven't
already developed? It's a wonderful thing called India, all right, so the Oracle has one
of the biggest support structures in the world, so it's really easy, they hire people, they
look for the Red Hat certification, they hire you, you get on the phone, you go out, and
that's a real problem that Red Hat has actually, right? Try selling Red Hat in Israel, or
Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait, I work in India, so I have all those places, and you know, I always have to
say, you know, you better call up, you know, Red Hat or Nobel, or whoever you're buying yourself
from, and be sure they got somebody here, you know, that can come out and help you, and they're like,
don't you, as Harvard member has somebody, and I'm like, it's only up to level two, so level three
support comes from the Linux, India. But in terms of, so they say, I'll have a problem with my
Oracle system, I find out that's all right, okay, there's a bug in this particular place,
it's off of you shit, how does that bug make it through the Oracle system, and then end up
as a fix, oh, for my particular setup, did I have any developers, or are they just...
Yeah, they'll fix it, they'll send somebody to your place, you'll look at the problem,
I know, they'll fix it. They'll send somebody out to my place to fix the problem.
That's the way it works. For an exorbitant fee, presumably, it is.
It is. I mean, once you look at that support contract, right, how does that fix,
then make it back into every other customer, so I'll end up running a bespoke version of Oracle
loads. In other words, it won't go back into the community here.
Right, all right, I'm working finance, so that wouldn't really fly in my environment.
Yeah, well, it wouldn't work, I mean, it might make it back into the Oracle tree,
yeah, right, but as far as I'm giving it back, I don't think you're going to be there.
I mean, maybe there were impactures, I don't know, I haven't seen anything, really, really.
But that's the interesting thing, because I, that's my Oracle book short after I was released,
and there was no real roadmap for any, any communication between them or that type of stuff,
so you know, I thought I could just, would you say the Oracle would write out a five-inched,
again, to continue that version until... Well, they're talking about a fork,
a fork of the, you know, that they were going to have their own fork, but then, you know,
I read the note from SAP that Oracle's going to have a 6.0 clock coming out, you know, in two or three weeks.
So they might even beat Red Hat to certification of the, of the clock, right?
And so it's, it's, you know, in, of course, with the certification inside the ERP space,
Oracle controls that, because they have the database, so it's, it's quite a, it's quite an interesting,
anybody got anything else? Yeah, with the patchy thing, because the, is interesting, I think, is,
I'm sorry? With the patchy industry, yeah, which is quite a bit too much, because I think it's like
him, I like to find out, and when Oracle came in to ask me to have Oracle Red Hat and some other
monkey coming in to try and looking at how much stuff would cost. We've got Red Hat everywhere,
we've got fascists. And Oracle has seen the figures as whole that, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, if you
have a problem with that, it would just come in and patch it, or they think they've seen the thing,
that's brilliant one, and we were like, huh, by the way, it's the best thing to do, because like,
no interest in that. It's like, it sounds good. You come in and say, oh, yeah, we've patched
that, fix a few in my bed for ladies, desolated, so it's fully ours, you know, it's only two hours
or so. But, um, we don't have a year, but we need, we need this stuff to be flowing to
slowly, because system, we don't want to have a golden tree, you know, effectively in our bank,
we shouldn't have to just be out of the gold, it doesn't work, it goes over, doing that, you
need to do something about that, but the way you're talking about doing it, that's, there's no
way that can be achieved, and then you have a golden tree for bank xyz, which, and it took
it kind of on board, oh yeah, we couldn't have done that alone, whatever, that's the only way,
it's a world, we don't, from a bank you want to do, we don't really care, that's all,
I think it goes back to the community, that's a trouble, it's true, but what we do care is that
the bank itself, around the world, that's the same. Right.
I saw a hand, oh yeah, so, you mentioned undercutting a red hat by 50% in the
in-tip for the full disclosure, I should mention undercut the red hat, one of the things that red
hats executives have constantly said to the market is that they've taken an industry with 10 billion
dollars and reduced it to one worth this year, one million dollars, that's the way that they
delivered value to CEOs by lowering the costs of producing and supporting the operating system,
so one of the things I really wonder with Oracle is, as far as the long-term plan goes,
if the aim is to undercut, how is that then sustainable? You can reduce and we all, in this
room, properly understand that open source can do more with less, by engaging the power in the
community, but there's a limit on that. It seems that currently, Oracle is in a position to
subsidise the Linux division from the database division, and that's something here from fields
by the database, have the OS for free. How is that long-term sustainable, and where does it lead
the community in 10 years, 15 years time? What's to stop a vendor in a position to do the hat,
owning the market, and then increasing prices on every window once they've achieved that don't
want to petition? Well, I mean, the profit on the database is 90 percent, right, and they've
had technology for years and years, and so that's a big cash thing, right, and so they bring you,
they don't want to talk to anybody, so they've had prints, and they don't want to talk to you,
and so they take your free cell, and they say, I've got a whole stack from the hardware,
from the hardware, you know, all the way up, right, and if I'm doing it at cost, that's a fantastic
thing to me, right, I'll break even on, right, and if I'm causing you grief because of it, that's
even better, and if I, if I piss everyone in the world off doing it, that's even better, right,
because I mean, I mean, I mean, the only more people more here are going to take more
air again when you talk to them than Oracle sells rub, there's a guy from IBM that's pushing power
seven, right, so, you know, if you get those two in the same room, my god, it's, it really only
works if they buy the whole thing, right, if they don't buy the whole thing, I mean, if they don't
buy it, the whole stack, they don't say, okay, I'm going to have to work on database, you know,
then it doesn't, then Oracle won't care, they're not going to sell links, they don't care
what you run your patch, you know, let me say that, but from where you have these discussions
with all systems, none of them at all, I don't care, so they were using their right to
get the whole thing as a gateway, like that, there's a wall mechanism getting into the bank,
so if we get those things going to support Red Hat, we'll be able to post it at the time.
They've been gaining anything out of it, up front, because we bought all the other,
we've all decided to get that, we bought all the Red Hat, so we had one position where
we have been with the rest of the earth, you know, we have a team we need, so they're
zero-sum game for them, it's not the front, they'll be sensible in the same way,
like those percent, they'll be able to support them, yeah, and further down as well,
so when you have to find a lot of things, they'll be able to get them out, so they don't
get that revenue through that, but it's, it's seen to be owed.
It's a, it's a, it's also a buy-in, right? It's also a buy-in, you know, if you buy, they're,
they're, they're, they're, they're Red Hat, you're also probably going to buy their
hike about your product, all right? And then you're taking the money from VMware.
I mean, I don't know, Zen has a great thing, but are not Zen, KVM is a fantastic thing.
Great benchmark, fantastic, Cisco did a fantastic benchmark within the other day, but
if you can take anything, if you can take 10% from VMware, it's, you know, it's worth the F,
you know, and that's, that, you know, it's, it's the complete picture. I mean, they, they took
Mark Herd away from us, and he, he's definitely had several magazine articles that said he wanted it
all, well now, Oracle wants it all too, you know? I just wish they were interested in the desktop,
but they weren't interested in the desktop, think about how great that could be. I mean, they can buy
economical. I mean, we actually said, you know, we can't deal with it, and so they should buy
that. Is it, is it Zen on my site, or Oracle bought that as well recently, and missed it?
Yeah, the packaging, the, well, it's, it's the derivative, correct me, if I'm wrong,
of the L5 Red Hat Zen. Right, right. So it's a bit more than a mystery. Yeah, but they paid,
they went to the Linux foundation again, when it's kind of the right form. They paid, it's not
your product, or something else. They're getting an open source product. The Zen is an open source,
and they have their own management tools. So the management suite is their own.
And if there's problems with that, do you buy it back up to Citrix as well? No, no. So you have
basically your own fork of that as well, exactly. Exactly. I missed the early part of your talk,
past this with cover for the House of GIF, it was the announcement by Red Hat, that they were going to be,
they weren't going to be packaging up the kernel, the, the, they're kind of patches.
So it's, it's not my medical technology. In return, in return, Oracle said that they weren't going to
certify Red Hat 60, that they paid. It's not a healthy ecosystem, it's a customer. They eat,
one of the other things we hear at Red Hat is, we don't want things, we don't want
the more genus systems. I've got it.
Hey guys, thank you very much for your time. I know, I hope I wasn't too warm. Thank you very much.
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