Web Forefront

Undercutting support prices from established vendors is nothing new, thousands of us make a living of it, charging less than corporate rate prices. But its one thing for a one man show or a 50 person consulting practice to offer "half-price", and quite another for a $70 billion dollar market capitalization company to undercut a $5 billion dollar market cap company on its own turf.

Conventional tech wisdom says the bulk of the money to be made in Linux -- or open source for that matter -- is through support because that's were the 'pain' is, but while this still remains true, the bar keeps getting higher in terms of who is willing the bear these headaches, never thought I would read a one liner like this: "Oracle will fix bugs in current and prior versions of Red Hat Linux software, providing similar levels of technical support as it now offers on Oracle databases and applications".

Bottom line : Red Hat's business model is being threatened by bigger players. Just on this announcement, Red Hat took an 11% hit on its stock price, placing a big question mark on the company's ability to remain competitive.