Hmmm. I didn't know the "volunteer developers" were that hands on with customers. Are you saying Red Hat leverages open source developers not only for product development, but also support?
You may be right that Oracle doesn't understand everything about running an open source service biz off of Red Hat's or any body else's distro, but think about it. Does Oracle plan on offering a full line of support, or only for implementatoins which it has expertise for. In other words, Oracle doesn't have to be as knowledgeable as Red Hat to begin with.
Also, the real question is whether Oracle can track Red Hat's prod dev cycle to the extent that its services team only needs to worry about incremental changes to the code, or does Oracle plan on starting out selling services to Red Hat, adopt Red Hat's customer base and then deploy its own Linux flavor.
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You may be right that Oracle doesn't understand everything about running an open source service biz off of Red Hat's or any body else's distro, but think about it. Does Oracle plan on offering a full line of support, or only for implementatoins which it has expertise for. In other words, Oracle doesn't have to be as knowledgeable as Red Hat to begin with.
Also, the real question is whether Oracle can track Red Hat's prod dev cycle to the extent that its services team only needs to worry about incremental changes to the code, or does Oracle plan on starting out selling services to Red Hat, adopt Red Hat's customer base and then deploy its own Linux flavor.