Ellison Talks Up Red Hat Linux

It seems the rumors that Oracle may offer Red Hat support are intensifying. One thing that seems to be slightly misunderstood by the MSM is that Oracle can't simply redistribute RHEL. What they could do is offer a RHEL-compatible version of Linux, as CentOS does, that is completely devoid of the Red Hat name and any associated logos. This would be a fairly inexpensive thing to do for Oracle, and to be honest it doesn't have a lot of down side to it. Ellison would get the entire stack that he seems to desperately want and customers would get a single neck to choke, which they love. As I mentioned in my previous post on this topic though, I don't necessarily think this would be a bad thing for Red Hat. It would serve to further solidify Linux as the platform of choice for Oracle and really serve to further validate Linux as a server in general (not that it's even needed any more at this point). While RHAT may lose some support contracts to ORCL in the short run, the mind share that Linux would gain would almost certainly benefit Red Hat in the mid and long term. Now, if I were Microsoft and Sun, this would worry me much more. They have the most to lose.
–jeremy
Oracle, Red Hat, ORCL, RHAT, Linux, Open Source, Sun, Microsoft, Ellison, RHEL