Oracle will sell support to Red Hat Linux customers and offer its own free clone of the open-source operating system, Chief Executive Larry Ellison said Wednesday, posing a major competitive challenge to the leading Linux seller.
"As of this moment, Oracle is announcing full support for Red Hat Linux," Ellison told thousands of attendees at the Oracle OpenWorld conference. "If you are a Red Hat support customer, you can very easily switch from Red Hat support to Oracle support."
Becoming an operating-system company is one of a series of bold attempts at growth by the software company, which in recent years also has acquired small and large rivals. Many major computing companies have embraced Linux, but until now, all have chosen partnerships with Linux companies rather than direct competition.
Ellison argued that customers of the Unbreakable Linux 2.0 service will enjoy lower costs, better bug fixes and better legal protections than with Red Hat. Software updates cost US$99 per server, while technical support costs US$399 for a two-processor server and US$999 per year for a larger system, Ellison said. And unlike Red Hat, Oracle will let anyone download the software for free.
"We will backport your bug fixes to earlier Linux versions," he said. "We will indemnify you from intellectual property problems. And our support costs way less than half of what Red Hat charges," Ellison said.
Oracle, like the CentOS project, wants to clone Red Hat's Linux based on the source code produced by the company, not create a new Linux variant. And Ellison promised that software certified for Red Hat's Linux will still work.
"If your application runs on Red Hat today, that application will run unchanged when you're getting Oracle support," Ellison said. "It's very important not to fragment the Linux market. Every time Red Hat comes out with a new version, we're going to sync our version with that version. All we add is bug fixes."
Red Hat didn't immediately comment.
Oracle will sell support to any Red Hat Linux customer, not just customers of Oracle products, Ellison said.
Ellison has suggested for months that the company had Linux plans, and recently, rumours have swirled that Oracle OpenWorld would be the forum for an official announcement.
Oracle can try to use open-source software to gain competitive advantage, but the open-source movement is also providing the company with lots of competition. Most directly are databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL, but also on the list are Java application servers and software for managing customer relationships and corporate inventory and accounting.
