Hi, On 9 Nov 2013, at 10:17 am, Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> wrote:
From what you say it seems that Oracle charges just for support while Red Hat and Suse charge binary license fees.
I'm sure Red Hat and SUSE would argue the point here. Technically, it's possible to get a trial version of each and install it, but you obviously don't get any updates without an active support subscription. Though, both Red Hat and SUSE prefer you buy at least a year's worth of support to get access to the binary installation media. Note that once your support expires, you no longer have access to those binaries, so save them somewhere. Red Hat goes further and requires that all Red Hat systems have an active support subscription if at least one does, which means you can't get support for only a subset of your fleet -- this is why a lot of companies are running Red Hat in production, but CentOS in development and test. Red Hat also have restrictions on the number of VMs you can run per support subscription. Oracle has a much simpler support structure: our binaries, updates and errata are all free to download and distribute. We provide a public yum service at http://public-yum.oracle.com (which is delivered via Akamai). This makes Oracle Linux the only Enterprise distribution that can be distributed by an ISV/IHV at no cost, which makes it excellent for appliances. We also don't have limitations on virtual guests. If you have a support subscription for the physical machine (and you only need one), you can run as many guests as you can cram onto the hardware. :) We also provide a bunch of additional tools at no cost: Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control is free to download and use to provision, patch, manage, monitor and alert on your Oracle Linux fleet, Oracle Clusterware support is included, Oracle OCFS2 clustered filesystem is included, XFS support is included with Premier support subscriptions (but the software is included regardless). So, all the bits you need to pay Red Hat or SUSE extra for, we include at no cost. Cheers, Avi