Linux Community Reacts to Oracles Unbreakable Linux Move

Published: Oct 26, 2006
Updated: Feb 2, 2021
1 minute read
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Oracles Unbreakable Linux move caught the Linux community by surprise, but, for the most part, theyre seeing a silver lining to Oracles latest shocker. Red Hat, for example, made the best of the news that Oracle will take Red Hat Linux and support it at cut rates.

“The opportunity for open source just got bigger,” said spokesperson Leigh Day. “Oracles announcement further validates open source and Red Hats technical leadership. We will continue to optimize Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Oracle and compete on value and innovation.”

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Kevin Carmony, CEO of Linspire, took a less optimistic view of the situation. This is “not good for Red Hat,” said Carmony. “Their stock is already down nearly 17 percent in after-market trading on this news. I guess it is, however, slightly better for Red Hat than if Oracle had gone with Debian or Ubuntu.”

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Speaking of Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, had been talking earlier on the same day about a possible partnership with Oracle. Thats, no longer in Ubuntus the crystal ball.

Shuttleworth said, “Given [Oracles] new commitment to the Red Hat code base, I expect them to be less open to other OSVs [open software vendors] for a while until the results from their initiative are in.”

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Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

I'm editor-at-large for Ziff Davis Enterprise. That's a fancy title that means I write about whatever topic strikes my fancy or needs written about across the Ziff Davis Enterprise family of publications. You'll find most of my stories in Linux-Watch, DesktopLinux and eWEEK. Prior to becoming a technology journalist, I worked at NASA and the Department of Defense on numerous major technological projects.

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