Thread: Red Hat has had with Linux and open source

But compared to the experience Red Hat has had with Linux and open source, how do you slot yourself on the same level of expertise?

In the late 90s, there was something called 'network computers'. That was a long time ago. What people don't know is they were actually based on Linux. We developed that network computer based on Linux, and that is the Linux engineering team we still have today. Lots of people in the industry don't know that we were providing patches to Linux for our large Oracle customer base even though they had active Red Hat subscriptions. It was long before we announced our Linux programme.

So, you can say that we have been in the Linux support business unofficially for quite some time. You think Red Hat has got all those big names, like Alan Cox [editor's note: till recently, as he's joined Intel in January 2009], contributing to it. That's true! But we too benefit from the same engineers. And I don't think that we are at a different contributing level from Red Hat. If you look at the contributors to the Linux Foundation, Oracle is quite high on that list. And if people still say that we don't contribute that much, it's not fair.

If you look at the large number of projects in the open source community that are freely running, Berkeley DB is a major one. It is a major contribution we have made-released under a dual licence. Although Oracle has been a good open source corporate citizen, I can't figure out why people don't wapt to give us credit for it.