[Info-vax] HP wins Oracle Itanium case

[John Wallace]

On Aug 5, 12:17 am, c... at wvnet.edu (George Cook) wrote:
> In article <2give9-kut1.... at news1.chingola.ch>, Paul Sture <p... at sture.ch> writes:
> > On Fri, 03 Aug 2012 21:05:20 -0400, David Froble wrote:
>
> >> Keith Parris wrote:
>
> >>> Actually, the Hurd Agreement confirmed that established practices (of
> >>> porting and release of new versions) would continue. So those
> >>> historical practices were effectively put into writing by Oracle and HP
> >>> signing that Agreement.
>
> >>> The court found HP had kept up its end of the bargain after the
> >>> Agreement, despite Oracle doing sneaky tricks like doubling the core
> >>> factor for Itanium (thus raising the price of Oracle on Itanium
> >>> compared with Sun).
>
> >> Hey, fuel costs for Larry's jet goes up every year ....
>
> > And will no doubt have taken another leap now he's bought his own
> > island...
>
> >> I'd feel that such tactics do not win friends.  Nor do they work in all
> >> cases.
>
> > I am sure that "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on
> > me" [1] applies here.
>
> >> I'm sure there might be some systems out there that are purely Oracle
> >> Servers, doing nothing else, and for such it might be rather easy for a
> >> customer to switch.  A businessman looks at the bottom line, and doesn't
> >> much care about the technical issues. For such a system, perhaps Oracle
> >> will sell some Sun systems.
>
> > Even if the underlying database is feature (and bug?) consistent across
> > all platforms, porting from one platform to another is still a major
> > undertaking.  Switching from HP-UX/other to Solaris or Oracle's flavour
> > of Linux is going to require recompilation and testing at the very least.
>
> > Even current RHEL customers are likely to find that switching to Oracle's
> > Linux (which I understand is based on RHEL) is going to require serious
> > work, and let's not forget those customers who require certification.
>
> Converting the first RHEL system to Oracle Linux can be a real PITA.
> The procedure, when it actually works instead of spewing vomit, is
> poorly documented with some major required steps completely undocumented.
> Once one knows all the pit falls and work arounds, then a conversion
> should take about an hour (assuming a high speed internet connection)
> and one reboot.  If you use the supplied RHEL kernel instead of the
> Oracle kernel, there is a very good probability any application software
> will just work unless you have something which requires rebuilding
> against new kernels (e.g. vmware), etc.  Even the Oracle kernel will
> probably just work.  Of course, YMMV.
>
> George Cook

That's interesting.

I've read elsewhere (can't remember or quickly find where) that Oracle
Linux is mostly just RHEL without the branding (statements like that
need much more qualification). But what would Oracle want customers to
think was involved in moving from their own Linux variant to the best
known enterprise Linux in the industry (from which theirs is derived)?