Re: Oracle for Linux?

"C. Eric Ladner" <clad_at_chevron.com> wrote:

>Torsten Reichert wrote:
>> > Does Oracle have any plans to support Linux? They support so many
>> > other platforms (especially flavors of Unix) that it would seem like
>> > a good market for them.
>> >
>> you can run the sco-port on linux!
>> greetings
>> Torsten
 

>But, running the SCO-port on Linux isn't supported.
>

Nothing produced by Oracle will be supported on Linux, at least not until Linux is taken over by some organisation which can represent it, support it, sell it pre-installed on PCs, bundle it with Oracle etc.

Given that Linux is free and that most companies would rather pay money for a product with a support service to back it up (so they'd probably go for SCO, Unixware or Solaris x86), rather than get something for nothing and trust their 'enterprise system' with it, then you can probably see that Oracle won't be too excited at the prospect of trying to sell their products to a relative minority of Linux users. And then of course, they'd have to support it...

Oracle 6 used to run on several Intel flavours of Unix from the same distribution, back when there were several flavours (Interactive, AT&T, Unisys etc). With Oracle 7, they split the ports up because the OS's were beginning to differ so much. At the same time they dropped a few of the less popular ports. Since then, SCO has dominated the market and is now one of the top 5 selling platforms (almost up there with Sun Sparc and HP sales).

I'm not saying that Oracle will never support it. If Linux were to take the world by storm and people could make real money out of it, then things may change, but I don't think Linux is that sort of animal.

Just my $0.02.

Regards,

Simon Denvers
Oracle DBA/Unix Systems Administrator (ex-Oracle WWS UK) English Heritage, London Received on Thu Apr 11 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST