> > CentOS support, so we don't impact RH's business. Oracle on the > > other hand DOES offer paid support, which impacts RH's business, and > > I don't see any substantive attempts by oracle to give anything back > > to the community at large. > Just to be fair to Oracle on this count, they do give to the community: - Free OS: OEL - Free databases (no cost): Oracle XE - Free cluster/parallel filesystems: OCFS2 - And quite a bit more... all available at oss.oracle.com In terms of OEL, the technical details all revolve around a RH based Linux that can run Oracle with pre-tuned parameters (memory settings, disk buffers and so on). They also support other OS distributions including Debian (*) and Solaris. * DISCLAIMER: I have customers (and therefore a business relationship with Oracle) that run Oracle XE on Debian Lenny. -geoff --------------------------------- Geoff Galitz Blankenheim NRW, Germany http://www.galitz.org/ http://german-way.com/blog/