451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
Larry Ellison Speaks
Raven Zachary, April 17, 2006 @ 11:50 am ETThe Financial Times published an in-depth interview with Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, on Sunday. From the original article (registration required), Larry sheds some light on a number of interesting topics relating to open source. You can also read a synopsis of the interview from Reuters, but it leaves out some important points. In summary:
* He has been dwelling on the potential and threat of open source.
* Oracle doesn’t have to fight open source, it has to exploit it.
* The Oracle acquisition of JBoss fell through due to its price.
* He finds it hard to pay large amounts for acquiring open source vendors when there are limited barriers to entry for competition.
* Oracle looked at acquiring Novell, due to its ownership of SUSE, but decided against it (some of the news sites are incorrectly reporting that Oracle is considering a purchase of Novell, based on this interview).
* He thinks there is value in ‘one throat to choke’ – providing a complete technology stack for customers from the operating system on up.
Larry again offers us a lot of details to consider. I wish more CEOs were this open in the press!
Comments (6) Categories: M&A,Software
I just came across this report saying that Oracle might be considering Novell.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70674-0.html?tw=wn_index_7
I think that Novell is a great company and I like SUSE linux, it is a good alternative to Redhat and I think it will be a good move for Oracle.
What I find fascinating about the news coverage of this interview, and the fact that Novell’s stock price was up today (while Red Hat’s was down), was that the article indicated that Larry Ellison considered an acquisition of Novell, but did not pursue it. Yet, most sites are treating this as a moving target. Here is the sentence from the article by the Financial Times: “Oracle looked at buying Novell, owner of SuSe, Europe’s biggest Linux company, but would have faced the same risk, he adds.” The same risk that Larry Ellison refers to here is the acquisition of Red Hat.
Why is everyone getting so excited about nothing?!
If anything, this points to an “acquisition” of a smaller Linux vendor or project team to become Oracle Linux.
Agreed, Raven. I get the impression that even if he could carve off SuSE from the rest of Novell, it’d still be more expensive than what he’d want to pay. All the more so, then, for the whole company.
Not sure how many people know this, but for six years, Oracle Japan has been the majority owner of a localized distro called Miracle Linux. Would imagine there are some resources there if they really wanted to roll their own. Or of course, Mandriva is an obvious candidate if you’re shopping for Tier 2 distros with a known product, community, and for-profit orientation.
Ned – fascinating comment re: Miracle Linux. I had no idea! Thanks for the information.
[...] Lisa Vaas of eWeek. Permalink | Email This Post | Technorati Links | Bookmark on del.icio.us | digg it Categories: Software,Linux [...]
[...] This has not been confirmed by Oracle, although it is based on a briefing made by Oracle to journalists, the article states (but the details are a bit sketchy at this point). However, this seems to align with a Financial Times interview with Larry Ellison published in April (see blog post). [...]