451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
Oracle-Ubuntu?
Nick Patience, April 19, 2006 @ 2:56 pm ETAs we’re working our way through the world’s Linux distros - see comments to Raven’s post a few days ago for interesting discussion about Miracle Linux - thoughts of some have turned to Ubuntu. Wonder what Mark Shuttleworth would have to say about that? I think we’ll find out soon enough.
And here’s a good roundup of recent goings on by Lisa Vaas of eWeek.
Categories: Linux, M&A, Software
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OK. Here’s my take.
I can see absolutely no reason for Oracle to go out there and buy a full-fledged popular Linus distribution? After all why would it want that, really?
On the other hand I can absolutely see a reason for Oracle to fork off and roll its own distribution; it could be skinny and highly optimized to run the Oracle DB. They could lock it down, package the whole stack into a single internally supported bundle and sell it as a software appliance.
Certainly the distro could and would be made available to the wider community for use, and Oracle might even garner some free development contributions from the outside community.
Does this sound familiar? It should; it is pretty much what Apple did when it decided to base OS X on a Mach kernal +BSD and released Darwin on an unsuspecting world.
But buy Red Hat, Ubuntu, or Novell? Well if it buys Novell, it won’t be for Suse in my opinion.
Yeah, but the GPL might be a problem for Oracle in that scenario.
Maybe instead they go the xBSD route (like Apple). No license issues, and more of a distinct offering they could “own” - as opposed to being Yet Another Linux Distro. Think about the financial difficulties that the OpenBSD project has been having, for example.
I know what you are saying, but I don’t think that the GPL should be a problem; I wasn’t really suggesting that the DB and the operating system be melded into a single linked program. API-level should be enough, I would have thought.
And I think there is greater PR value in having its own Linux distro, both in terms of continuing to give Red Hat a kicking, and in terms of the ‘based on Linux’ marketing message which still has greater clout than ‘based on BSD’.
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