Oracle Pushes Linux — Full Force

Having paid a royal sum for Sun, one might expect Oracle to be a major Unix promoter. Yet apparently that’s not the case.

Based on Oracle’s recent actions, it seems the company is hell-bent on driving as many of its potential customers as possible away from the UNIX offerings it acquired from Sun and into the arms of Red Hat and other enterprise Linux vendors.

I’ve talked before about how UNIX is a sinking ship as increasing numbers of workloads are moved off the operating system and onto Linux. This should not be surprising: Linux can handle increasingly “high-end” workloads, and it can run on far lower cost hardware. Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on standard Intel hardware can end up being 90 percent less expensive than running Solaris on SPARC machines, not to mention three times faster.

What is surprising then is Oracle’s behavior. Given the threat from Linux you’d expect Oracle to be doing everything in its power to discourage customers from moving away from UNIX. Sun had a strategy for doing this: It made Solaris free. Anyone could download it, register it, and use it for as long as he or she wanted. And Sun hoped to make money out of it by, eventually, selling subscriptions for support and patches to those who wanted it at the very least. Not much different from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server model. So far, so Linux, you might say.

Read the rest at ServerWatch.