so with the keynote today, Oracle announced that it is supporting Red Hat and backporting bug fixes and patches to previous and older versions of the operating system. The VP of Engineering at Yahoo used a phrase that brought back memories. The term “legacy systems” to me always meant Dell and IBM hardware. Today, that means Solaris Sparc machines. With this announcement I wonder how this will change the industry. Since Red Hat makes the majority of their revenue with service and Oracle is giving away the Linux kernel, where will Red Hat make money?
The argument that Larry brought forth that patches and bug fixes go into the new kernel for new and previous kernel versions. This is an interesting concept. The ability to change your patch system from Red Hat to Oracle is amazing. To make this happen you need to go to linux.oracle.com and download the up2date rpm. This rpm is configured to go to oracle.com. This is a great way of getting adoption and migration of existing Red Hat customers to switch to Oracle.
This should be very interesting.