I hope Red Hat follows Oracle's advice to give away its Enterprise Linux with the same speed that Oracle has exhibited in taking Bob Evans' advice. Evans, an InformationWeek director, said in a letter to Larry Ellison that Oracle should give its customers a break during the downturn and lower the annual maintenance costs.Evans is director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit and he published his open letter on Jan. 28. Before the letter, Oracle maintenance contracts were 22% a year, based on the initial software license price. Seven weeks after the letter, they're still 22%. I guess Oracle is trying to offer us a lesson in humility. When it comes to advice, surely it is better to give than to receive. I've been struck how in this time of economic stress, one of the few remaining readily available commodities is advice.

Oracle's Wim Coekaerts, the otherwise sound Linux developer and leader of Oracle's Unbreakable Linux and Oracle Enterprise Linux initiatives, came up with the notion in an interview that Red Hat was holding Linux users back. More of them would convert from Unix and other commercial databases to Linux/Oracle if only Red Hat would give its Enterprise Linux away.

Doesn't Red Hat add value to Linux through its testing and compatibility certifications? Isn't RHEL 5 safer to run in enterprise production environments than less tested versions?

Coekaerts agreed, Red Hat did add value. But it still seemed logical to him that Red Hat, as an open source company, should make its product freely downloadable.

Oracle knows all about giving Linux away. It takes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, strips the labels and logos out of it and redistributes it for free as Oracle Enterprise Linux. That's it. There's no value added, no optimizations, additions or adjustments to make it run better with the database. It's just a matter of repackaging Red Hat's product.

I actually thought Oracle added value somewhere in that process. Coekaerts explained too much value added can be too much of a good thing. Changes to the code would mean a fork. And it wouldn't be good for customers to be using a forked version of Red Hat with their databases, different from their other Red Hat versions.

Coekaerts insisted Oracle gave something back in the form of bug fixes to Red Hat's Bugzilla. I'm glad Red Hat's balance sheet doesn't count too heavily on Oracle contributions.

Personally, I think this recession has gone on long enough. The more I see of what's freely available -- the advice, I mean -- the wackier I think the industry is getting. Each company must act in what it believes is its own best interest and not presume to know the best interest of another company. As best I know, Oracle is not an exception to this rule, and if anything, this episode proves it.