Page 2 of 2 Oracle's version Versus Red Hat's

In October of 2006, Oracle officially announced its Oracle Unbreakable Linux offering, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Ever since then, Oracle has maintained that it is maintaining binary file compatibility with Red Hat.

"Oracle does not compete on product differentiation we want to provide good quality support," Coekaerts stated. "One of the reasons why EL is the same as RHEL is we didn't want to introduce yet another version of Linux. It makes it easy for our ISVs to say this is the same, it's not something new."

Coekaerts added that Oracle contributes all bug fixes back to Red Hat. Oracle does not work on new features for Enterprise Linux. As such Coekaerts argued that there is no reason for Red Hat to argue that Oracle's Linux is different. In fact, arguing that it's different is likely not a good thing for Red Hat, in Coekaerts view.

"What's the biggest piece for a customer? The operating system helps you but it is not the core, it's not the critical piece," Coekaerts said. "We've been very successful. We want to grow the Linux market. We're not trying to convert the existing Red Hat users to Oracle. We just want to make sure that Linux is the best platform to run Oracle."

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