[Glastonbury] suse license

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Tue, Nov 16, 2004 at 11:52:28AM +0000, tim hall wrote:
> Last Tuesday 16 November 2004 08:35, Andrew M.A. Cater was like:
> > The same Oracle
> > software will run on both - but Oracle won't "support" Debian. Ditto
> > Slackware.
> 
No, Oracle isn't free software. It's commercial and I don't _think_ you
can easily get source and modify it as such. You pay Oracle for support.
> Do you mean to say that Oracle is Free Software? or just that it would run on 
> a Debian system?
Oracle will run on almost any Linux system given a bit of work - but it
won't be _supported_ on anything other than a few heavyweight enterprise
server editions of the various distributions. Yoyo principle applies 
(You're on your own, pal :) )

Apparently, Oracle may require the Linux vendor to install dedicated support
workers at the distribution's expense to join the Oracle systems support 
teams - that's a significant salary cost and one that the Debian Project, 
for example, couldn't afford.
> 
> Thanks for the explanation here, I think this is one of the best descriptions 
> of the differences between distros I've yet read on a mailing list. Nice one!
> 
That's OK. It's always worth thinking these things through -
_especially_ when using Linux in a commercial/mission critical situation
- life is different from my hobby when I'm at work and the critical
  factors and commercial/support pressures are different.

Andy