Comments on: Unbreakable Red Hat http://bill.burkecentral.com/2007/07/18/unbreakable-red-hat/ Software plumbing using middleware wrenches Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:53:14 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Andy http://bill.burkecentral.com/2007/07/18/unbreakable-red-hat/#comment-21 Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:07:09 +0000 http://billburke.wordpress.com/2007/07/18/unbreakable-red-hat/#comment-21 I don’t know anyone who has actually run OUL. Let alone put it into production. On the other hand me and all my friends are on Ubuntu ;-)

]]> By: Savio Rodrigues http://bill.burkecentral.com/2007/07/18/unbreakable-red-hat/#comment-14 Thu, 19 Jul 2007 18:33:00 +0000 http://billburke.wordpress.com/2007/07/18/unbreakable-red-hat/#comment-14 Ahh, good, I didn’t expect the truce would last for long :-)

In no way do I suggest that Red Hat has poor quality engineers. I’m sure there are rock stars on Red Hat’s payroll. My point is that the work that these rock stars (or even average developers) working at RH do is available to anyone. Oracle doesn’t need to buy RH to get their hands on their work.

You’re 100% right Bill, the source is just one aspect of the value an OSS vendor brings to the table. I talked about the Brand, Technology & Customer aspects that go into an acquisition decision in my post. I list my reasons for why I don’t think Oracle gains much via a RH acquisition across these 3 aspects of analysis.

Partly, this is because Oracle isn’t trying to be a leading operating system vendor. They want to be the #1 apps (& middleware) vendor. Towards this goal, I’d argue that owning the middleware decision helps more than owing the operating system decision. That’s why I think BEA is a better candidate for Oracle, and hey, JBoss would have been a good fit also.

Listen, if you want to get acquired again, let me know. I have a few dollars saved up :-)

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