Oracle to Buy It’s Own Linux Distribution?
April 17th, 2006 by Mark Rittman
"Oracle considers venturing into Linux", Financial Times : "Oracle is
studying whether to launch its own version of the Linux operating system and has
looked at buying one of the two companies currently dominating the Linux world,
according to Larry Ellison, the software company’s chief executive officer. Such
a move would redraw the software landscape and open a new front in Oracle’s long
rivalry with US rival Microsoft. In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr
Ellison said that Oracle wanted to sell a full “stack” of software that, like
Microsoft, included both operating system and applications. “I’d like to have a
complete stack,” he said. “We’re missing an operating system. You could argue
that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux
…
… Red Hat’s own acquisition last week of JBoss – another open source
company whose products compete with Oracle and IBM – could shake up alliances in
the Linux world and provide another reason to act, said Mr Ellison. “Now that
Red Hat . . . competes with us in middleware, we have to re-look at the
relationship – so does IBM,” he said. On Red Hat’s growing influence and its
ambitions to reach beyond the Linux operating system, he added: “I don’t think
Oracle and IBM want another Microsoft in Red Hat.”
April 17th, 2006 at 6:28 pm
That is awesome. They would have to do a lot of thinking about what interface to use and what software to include. But once they made those decisions, watch out.
If they then bought Sun or Dell, they would be the next IBM.
LewisC
April 17th, 2006 at 6:43 pm
Maybe Larry needs to go buy RedHat and make it IBMs problem, then Oracle gets JBoss in the end anyways. They obviously can’t go after Suse without going after Novell and that doesn’t make sense. CentOS is too free to get bought (I’ve been wrong before though). what other linux players are out there ripe for the picking?
April 17th, 2006 at 8:39 pm
Sun. Solaris and Java fit nicely into Oracle’s strategy.
April 18th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
Sun also released Sun Linux 5.0 a few years ago… based on RedHat 7.2 and optimized for the Sun Hardware. but it has been decommissioned
April 18th, 2006 at 6:12 pm
“I don’t think Oracle and IBM want another Microsoft in Red Hat.” == “we’d rather be the new microsoft ourselves”
April 18th, 2006 at 8:58 pm
Hi Mark!
Cheers
Well this issue has come full-circle!
This is a huge deja vu for me. I posted about an article I wrote about this very subject, get this, in 1998 on my blog linked above.
Paul