Had a talk with an Oracle person yesterday

[Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>]

Hi,

on a Novell-Event in Berlin I had the chance to talk a man at the Oracle booth
and asked him what might be the main problem, why Oracle does not officially
support Debian:

  0) We agreed that Google has a lot of answers how to install Oracle on
     Debian, but there is no official support.
  1) Oracle cares about Market share of a distribution (we agreed that Debian's
     market share is hard to measure) and they are not able to support a whole
     lot of distributions.
  2) Debian does not support stable releases for five years as RedHat or SuSE do.
     <provocation mode>
       Those people who always claim that Debian stable is not up to date
       might note that at the same time it is not old enough.
     </provocation mode>
     IMHO this problem is more or less easy to fix if those companies who
     sell Debian support would speak up and guarantee security fixes for older
     releases.  I guess they might do this anyway but they should it declare
     openly.
  3) I asked whether it might make sense to support LSB instead of a certain
     distribution.  Because I'm not an LSB expert I was not able to invalidate
     the arguments that there are:
       - no fixed gcc version
       - no fixed glibc version
       - no fixed kernel versions and unpredictable patches inside the kernel
     (If you ask me than software that depends from certain versions of the
      above is not well designed - but I might be wrong here.)

Just to let you know

           Andreas.