Thread: Outdated software stack

But even if you look at Red Hat, they are still supporting RHEL 3 and RHEL 4, with a pretty outdated software stack.

I want to give you some specific examples. Let's say you've got GCC version 2.3, and now you have found a bug that needs to be fi,xed. But by this time, Red Hat may have added 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, etc. So when you approach them for the fix, their answer will beto upgrade to the latest version of that package for that release, The situation is like, you are at GCC 2:3, the latest RHEL package for GCC is 2.76, or whatever, which means there is a gap there. For an enterprise, every.new feature inside a version is a risk.

So what you want is that one bug fixed, and not have to upgrade to that latest version packed in the RHEL release. I'm not saying from RHEL 3 to RHEL 5; I'm talking about packages inside those release chains. So wherever we jump from one version to another, there can be several changes. This is a risk. Customers don't want to see that, but that's the answer they get from Red Hat.

But what we do is find the bug in that package and fix it in the same version, and give it to the customer. It has never been done by any on, as it involves significant amounts of engineering. If the customer is okay to upgrade to whatever package in that release, then it's okay; you don't need that premium backporting feature.

I'm just telling you the difference between Red Hat and us; and there is another very important thing-we offer life-time support. So for concepts like RHEL 3 reaching 'end oflife', there is no such thing with Oracle Enterprise Linux-we support that forever. The same is the case with our database. It is company policy. I don't think there is any other Linux distribution that does that.

Another thing is that we let our customers manage their infrastructure for free. Red Hat charges on Red Hat Network Satellite and also has a pre-server fee.