This distribution of Linux represents what Oracle would like to us to consider as its more open and community focused side, although of course a paid support model is available and widely adopted.
But it’s not just about whether the software is free or not; what matters today is how open it is and how the software itself is architected and used by the developers and users who come into daily contact with it. The company asserts that its latest baby is the “only major enterprise Linux distribution” that publishes all bug fixes and security errata publicly. This openness is hoped to achieve more flexibility than other commercial Linux distributions.
According to the technical spec sheets, “Oracle Linux 7 benefits from rigorous testing of more than 128,000 hours per day with real-world workloads.”
Oracle can do open software right
Despite Oracle’s (arguably) less than salubrious performance with OpenOffice (the LibreOffice fork has since famously flourished and Oracle has since donated OpenOffice to the
What Oracle does well with Linux 7 is to add additional toppings and extras over and above the mainline Linux code base. Its ‘value-add’ proposition here includes Ksplice (a technology for zero-downtime kernel patching), DTrace (for real-time diagnostics) and its B-tree file system (Btrfs). This is Linux optimised for commercial deployments and, whatever you think of Larry Ellison personally, he probably knows more about commercial data deployments than most.
“This gives Oracle both a competitive story and a measurable differentiation,” argues Al Gillen, programme VP for servers and system software at IDC. “
As IDC’s Gillen points out, many customers today are standardising their server deployments using consistent hardware and operating system layers. This version of Linux should be suitable for a wide variety of business workloads, ranging from database-centric and application-specific commercial jobs, to infrastructure and web-focused workloads.
So would Oracle like to see its own Linux outperform Microsoft Windows? Well for sure, why not? But this is not the game play here. The company would prefer to position Oracle Linux 7 as an ideal operating system for OpenStack due to its support for any OpenStack distribution. The theory being that the all-powerful cloud is a better route to long-term market share than any other.
Microsoft snuggles up to Oracle
Indeed, Microsoft positively snuggles up to Oracle’s Linux-powered machinations and manoeuvrings so that we feel comfortable enough to deploy Oracle on the Azure cloud if we want to.
“Microsoft congratulates Oracle on its release of Oracle Linux 7. Since June 2013, Microsoft and Oracle have collaborated to help customers embrace cloud computing by providing greater choice and flexibility in how to deploy Oracle software,” said Jason Zander, corporate vice president, Microsoft Azure. “We recently added Oracle Linux to the list of Hyper-V guest OS’s for Windows Server and Microsoft Azure and we look forward to offering this latest release in Microsoft Azure.”
While not operating with a completely unblemished set of open computing credentials, Oracle is doing a lot right with its own Linux 7. All bug fixes and security errata are published publically on the company’s public yum servers (not as fun as it sounds, YUM stands for Yellowdog Updater, Modified command line utility)… and this, in theory, allows customers to install the same code across all their deployments, with or without a subscription.
Although it is worth remembering that Oracle is still essentially following the Linux lead, effort and standard set by Red Hat with its RHEL engineering team's dedication to QA, testing and version control, the industry reception here is generally positive.
"This is a reasonably good move by Oracle – and it leaves its Solaris OS hanging a little as an orphan, sunset OS. The key for users will be to keep Oracle on the straight and narrow: the last thing that we need is a YALF (Yet Another Linux Fork). In the new world of hybrid cloud computing, portability of workload will be a major area, so if Oracle Linux “N” starts to tie people in to an Oracle Stack in any way, then it will breed issues in a customer base that will feel that it has been hung over yet another proprietary barrel," said Clive Longbottom, founder of UK-based technology analyst house Quocirca.
In the new world of hyper encryption, ultimate code transparency and open cloud computing platforms, even Larry Ellison thinks that open operating systems are a good idea.
