It’s well established that I think Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison resembles a classically-styled supervillain. Why, on occasion, I’ve even compared him to Lionel Luther from Smallville. In fact, Ellison’s resemblance to Luther is uncanny. It’s something about those Savile Row-tailored suits, the swarthy look, and the beard, combined with his self-styled image as a modern Samurai warlord — Ellison just fits the part of a Bond bad guy. You just know that his $16,000,000 Atherton CA, Japanese feudal estate, complete with tea gardens, Bonsai trees, and sakura blossoms also has sharks with frickin’ laser beams in the swimming pool.
But I think Larry is an easy target, and it’s easy to make fun of a larger than life personality. Oracle, however, is not scoring big points with Linux customers lately. It’s Unbreakable Linux offering is much better known as “That crappy CentOS clone.”
Yes, I know that Larry has been bragging that Unbreakable has “displaced” Red Hat Linux at Yahoo, and that Oracle is signing Unbreakable support contracts, some of which are “over half a million dollars” in size. Oh, I’m sure there have been a few token companies that have been taken along for the ride. But most of the enterprise customers I have spoken to that are firmly entrenched in Red Hat want nothing to do with Oracle’s “me too” Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone. They want the original. Coca-Cola, not Sam’s Cola from Wal-Mart.
I’ve said previously that it was a stupid idea for…
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