Oracle Linux?
Ashlee Vance comments in Larry Ellison’s Linux nears release – pundit the rumors, that Oracle will have an own linux distribution in the future. Personally i believe this would make no sense. Out of the following reasons:
- Oracle has to develop and support an own distribution. This would pose large costs to Oracle
- All changes Oracle makes in Linux must be put back to Linux. So optimisations to the Oracle Linux for Oracle will appear in all other distributions obliterate any unique technical selling point
At Oracles position, i would use Solaris or Opensolaris as the foundation for an own stack. Solaris is already the development platform for 64-bit x86, the CDDL allows Oracle to keep optimizations of their code in their distribution and with dtrace and fma alone, you get a more capable foundation for running enterprise class databases.