[sf-lug] The future of Redhat?

[Tony]

With Oracle moving away from RedHat and Novell and
Windows making a deal, what is the future of Redhat?
Yes, we pay for Redhat but it has been a good linux
OS. 

Here's an opinion.

**

Can Red Hat go it alone?
By Phil Hochmuth

The enterprise IT market is becoming a lonely world
for Red Hat.

If Red Hat wasn't having a bad enough November -
following the announcement of Oracle's strategy to
steal away Red Hat support customers - the
Novell/Microsoft Linux pact may have made it worse.
Oracle's brash move is to offer support for Red Hat
Linux customers and an alternate code base, which the
company says will be more finely-tuned to run Oracle
apps.

The Microsoft and Novell agreement will involve
co-development of virtualization technology. This will
allow Windows and SuSE Linux servers to operate in
virtualized environments, where the two operating
systems run on the same machine - hosted, at the root,
by either company's platform. A patent agreement made
between the companies also guarantees they won't sue
each other's users as a result of any mixed-code
offerings they cook up.

Worse for Red Hat, Microsoft said it will now
recommend Novell's SuSE for users running mixed-system
environments.

All this puts the squeeze on Red Hat. Things could get
really bad for the company if large enterprise ships
running Oracle flock to the database maker for
support, and Microsoft/Novell come up with a real
offering to make Linux/Windows environments run better
than Microsoft/Red Hat environments.

Red Hat has powerful friends of its own, however. IBM
and HP are key allies with the software maker, having
used Linux as an effective way to counter their own
waning Unix technologies, and drive hardware sales. As
long as Red Hat continues to make reliable, powerful
software while keeping its powerful server-making
friends, expect the Linux vendor to weather the
Oracle/Microsoft/Novell perfect storm.