Wim Coekaerts Blog

ok, so it's been about a year since my last entry :-) sorry ! it has been a tad busy as many of you can probably guess from all the activity that's been going around.

The Unbreakable Linux launch at Oracle OpenWorld has been a huge effort and it is very exciting to be in the middle of all this, so to speak. For those that don't recall, we announce a Linux support program called Unbreakable Linux (a second incarnation if you will). We offer support subscriptions for any customer (no Oracle required ! :) which either has an existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation (we support RHEL3 and RHEL4) or starts from scratch by downloading our re branded but otherwise identical distribution Enterprise Linux 4(see http://edelivery.oracle.com/linux)

A lot has changed, yet a lot hasn't changed. What hasn't really changed is the type of work we do, we have expanded this and made it a formal worldwide contractual program but in actuality we have been doing this since about 2001/2002. The old program was more of an informal way of helping our Oracle product customers that moved to Linux to have a place to go to if something goes really wrong on the OS side. We have been helping a set of customers over the last number of years in pretty much the same way as we do now. We help them fix the hairy bugs and we provide the best level of support we can provide, and they require. What has changed is that the team has gotten a lot bigger over the years and the capability to offer this to the public at large.

So, many things are going on, and I think it's a good time to re-cap a number of these and clarify some of the misconceptions out there. A few weeks ago I was thinking of writing something up but that was after reading some article written by an individual who had not done any sort of research, randomly put some comments together that were totally off base and I was very upset. That blog entry would not have been very pretty :) so I decided to just delete it. Over the last few months a lot has been said in various places about what it is we do and why, and much of that info has been, quite frankly, wrong. But since it's been so busy and we prefer to focus on helping customers and making this successful, it was better to ignore those things and just move on and let results speak for themselves.

Where to start ... the program

Many people out there still think we jumped into the distribution business. I 'd like to say we are in the Linux OS support subscription business not the building-yet-another distribution business. What our customers have come back to us with over the last 2 years is the request for Enterprise quality support. The ability to talk to someone that will help with difficult problems and provide fixes for those difficult problems in a timely manner. Not having to apply a ton of changes at once, not having to wait 6 or 9 months for a critical bug to get fixed, someone that understands that a system that goes down once a week is in fact, -not- a good thing.

You might say, well duh, of course - well you know though, that actually IS missing (or rather was, until last year ;-) .

That is what we are doing now, that is where we are targeting our efforts. And as I mentioned a few paragraphs earlier, what we have been doing for a few years already but mostly behind the scenes. The reason it is now public is because at some point, we didn't see the previous partner offerings succeed or go where it should go and this was pretty much our only alternative.

So what does this mean to you, the customer. Well first off, if you already run Linux, in particular rhel. It's very easy, just like the demo at Oracle OpenWorld (which was real not fake, and yeah my connection timed out to the server but hey it was a quick fix ;) . you basically keep your existing installation, zero change needed and just use Oracle to get support (metalink/phone) and ULN (unbreakable linux network) for patches (linux.oracle.com). just change up2date as a package that points to our server. everything else will then just be the same from an OS point of view and support comes from here. you might suddenly boot up with a darned cute confident looking penguin :) and see Enterprise Linux rather than Red Hat Enterprise Linux but that's pretty much it.

Secondly, if you don't already have RHEL installed or you are new to Linux or what not, we offer a FREE, yes, FREE, no hassle, no phone calls to sales people or non-free evaluation copies or whatever crippled versions of 2 years ago, download of a set of ISOs which we call Enterprise Linux 4 update 4. It is fully compatible and basically identical to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 4. We removed the trademarks and applied a few serious bugfixes. This is where all the hoopla and controversy starts. Pretty painful ;-) . It is the same code people, it is the same code. We HAD to re-brand the RHEL setup because you just can't get free for download from anywhere. So we take out trademarks,  copyrights and  graphics and we replace it with, well, other names and definitely a cuter logo ! Between Red Hat, Novell and Oracle, we 're the only one with a penguin as a mascot ! duh. And that becomes our "distribution". Do we want to fork ? No, not at all, not one bit, do we do this for fun ? No. Do we do this to create more work ? No. We do it because that's the only way we can build a CD set based on an open source product from an open source company that we can make available for download for free. That is what we do, I already posted the link above. And guess what, it's update 4, and when we release the next update (5), you can also freely download that one. It's free for production use if you want, no support provided then, but it's fine.  So people still try to say it's a fork. I just don't know how to convince them, I'd say - all the source code is out there, feel free to grab it, compare every single bit of code and post a follow-up to this blog as to where we break application compatibility or any sort of compatibility. There is a link http://www.oracle.com/technologies/linux/el4cert-ds.pdf which shows the differences that you have to be aware of and as you can see it's related to text not to actual applications running.

We are in this to provide a great level of support service that is required in the enterprise space and we offer the software ISOs for free for download so that everyone can deploy this.

That's another topic that has been going around - comparing our downloads with desktop stuff. Ya know - this is an enterprise distribution, we never uttered the work - home, or desktop or cutting edge development distribution. We build a service for businesses. EL4 will likely install on your desktop and if you do and use it we will support everything as we support it for our big  customers, but we 're not focusing on that. So I find it funny how there were comments on how Fedora and OpenSuSE downloads are as many a day as we have had total. Can I point out, there is no free easy download of RHEL or SLES - at all. there is of EL4 , so can I then state that we have had infinite more downloads than both those companies for the enterprise distribution ? If you find that a silly statement then you have to admit that the other statements made are just as silly :) also- the folks downloading our ISO set don't do this at home, they do this at work, and in general make this available to the company on an internal website. so one download for a big company might mean 100's of actual users or 1000's. Either way, what it comes down to is that you cannot compare the download numbers.

ok I am going to stop here for this one and promise that I will add more soon, I might end up writing a book here so let's call this prologue and soon chapter 1 will come. stay tuned.