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No one saw this coming. People talked about Oracle making its own Linux, or buying a Linux company (Ubuntu?). But, the news that Oracle is erasing Red Hats trademarks from Unbreakable Linux and supporting it for less than Red Hat is a bolt from the blue.
Or, perhaps, I should say that Oracle is firing a shot at the heart of Red Hat, and commercial Linux? This really, really ticks me off. Oracles claims as to why it felt it had to make this move are BS.
The Oracle press release reads, “Red Hat only provides bug fixes for the latest version of its software. This often requires customers to upgrade to a new version of Linux software to get a bug fixed. Oracles new Unbreakable Linux program will provide bug fixes to future, current, and back releases of Linux. In other words, Oracle will provide the same level of enterprise support for Linux as is available for other operating systems.”
First, no one supports their obsolete operating systems. Want to get support for Windows NT? 2000? 98!? Good luck!
In any case, with RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), you simply get the next version as part of your contract. No one has to stay with RHEL 3 unless they want to.
This also implies that bugs arent fixed in RHEL. Again, this is nonsense, Red Hats innovative RHN (Red Hat Network), which you also get with the aforementioned contract, makes sure that any RHEL bugs are repaired as fast as Red Hat, and the open-source community, can fix them.