Customer Backlash Against Oracle's Buggy Linux Product?

An entertaining and telling exchange between an analyst and Red Hat execs on last night's Red Hat F3Q07 earnings call:

Mark Murphy - First Albany

Matthew... our own survey of Red Hat customers showed that Oracle's Linux is essentially irrelevant to your customers in a lot of ways and we have also spoken to Oracle's own resellers, and they have actually been unable to figure out where to order the product from. And there is other feedback showing that Oracle's Linux is extremely buggy, and it keeps crashing, and Oracle has generated quite a bit of backlash and animosity from the broader open source community towards Oracle. So, I guess the question is, is it realistic to think that Oracle is just going to ride this experiment into the ground, or would you expect them to possibly withdraw their offering from the marketplace?

Matthew Szulik, CEO Red Hat

Mark, like the famous basketball coach at UCLA, John Wooden, used to say, we're focused on the success of our customers. We are focused on expanding the opportunity for open source software through initiatives like OLPC with RHEL 5, RHN 2.0, the expanding JBoss middleware stack, and I have to be frank with you, I don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about the operational issues and the Oracle operating system product. We are focused on making our customers tremendously successful with open source software.

Mark Murphy - First Albany

Thank you.

Charlie Peters

Thank you, Mark.

See: Red Hat Beats Guidance, Estimates; Stock Up 13%