Robert Scoble is linking to Justin Kestelyn who is asking why Oracle isn’t getting any blogging respect, especially around Web 2.0. According to Robert Oracle would get more respect if they’d invite more bloggers over to Oracle blogging events. Sure, I haven’t seen any events especially targeted at bloggers, but they recently organized a special event for Partners, which i blogged about (though not as much as i would have liked).
During this event Oracle demoed some of the upcoming web 2.0 features in it’s products. Tagging, relating information, wiki, presence, mashups, Ajax will all be available out of the box with Webcenter and JDeveloper 11g. I think this will earn Oracle some web 2.0 respect, when released. You can see some pictures of the demos here.
One commenter on Scoble’s blog said the lack of respect could be caused by Unbreakable Linux, which is seen as a cheap rip off of RedHat Enterprise Linux. According to this commenter Oracle should have created their own distribution. It may be a cause of disrespect, but i think Oracle did a good thing not inventing yet another Linux distribution. There are already enough Linux distributions. In fact, many people claim the problem with open source is that everybody wants to come up with their own solution, instead of working together on one solution. So i think it’s a good thing Oracle didn’t create their own distribution.
There are still a lot of people afraid of using open source because they think it’s not as well supported as commercial closed source software. This is the problem Oracle is trying to fix by providing support for Linux. They want people to migrate to Linux by giving them confidence in the support available.
Another reason for providing Linux support may their focus on making Grid computing easily manageable. If you want to run a grid of a 1000 cpu’s, doing upgrades or installing software should be easy. You want 24*7 availability, while still being able install upgrades and fixes. Oracle is doing this for their database and middleware software, by improving the provisioning facilities in Oracle’s Enterprise Manager. By providing support for the operating system, they can also improve management of the grid on the operating system level.
What do you think, should Oracle have made it’s own distribution?
April 27th, 2007 at 12:16:17
To be honest, I think Oracle’s Linux distribution is a reaction to their failed attempt to acquire JBoss.
I don’t see any value in Oracle having its own distribution, whatsoever.
April 30th, 2007 at 11:16:18
I don’t think Oracle had a lot to gain from acquiring JBoss. Technically they already have all of the pieces, there’s not much that JBoss has to offer. Maybe for their customers, or to avoid that redhat has the full appserver stack. Which ubuntu now also offers, by the way, by including glassfish in their distribution.
I think customers who get all their support from oracle will gain from the fact that oracle support cannot finger point to redhat anymore when something doesn’t work.
April 30th, 2007 at 14:57:31
“I think customers who get all their support from oracle will gain from the fact that oracle support cannot finger point to redhat anymore when something doesn’t work.”
I don’t want to be negative here…, but Oracle support is really not that good when it comes to things that have nothing to do with Oracle RDBMS and/or Oracle Applications. Not sure whether delivering their own Linux distro is going change/help that…?
And sure, Oracle has ‘a lot of pieces’ – but they still have a lot of work to do create a sound integrated whole/suite from all of those (bought) pieces.
April 30th, 2007 at 17:46:20
[...] Blogger Robert Scoble suggests that it has to do with a lack of actual community building: “I can’t remember when they did what JD did — link out to people and join the conversation. I can’t remember getting an invite to any Oracle blogging event.” A commenter on that post and one blogger at IT-eye wonder if Oracle’s general lack of respect in this community is a function of its Unbreakable Linux offering. (Piss off Linux fans and piss off the geek community at large?) [...]
April 30th, 2007 at 21:57:55
Agreed, i’m also not the biggest fan of oracle support, or any commercial support for that matter. I just takes too long, too much hassle, and usually the result is that you have to wait till the next release. Currently we are having a problem running oracle software on vmware. Oracle’s support isn’t really helpful, they don’t really support running on vmware, and you have to reinstall everything without vmware to prove that it’s their problem. Not really an option. So whenever i’m having a problem, i try to find a workaround. This is usually faster than working through support.
But i’m not sure the problem lies with oracle. Doing support is hard, trying to guess what people have been doing, installing, changing, etc. To be able to give proper support, a support team really needs to be able to log into your machine and examine it.
Regarding the pieces, true, but jboss would have been yet another piece requiring integration. Not a solution for any technical problem.