BeerFiles is a sometimes irreverent blog concerning all things to do with IT, technology, people and the media from the point of view of a hard boiled technology journalist and commentator. Stan has been in the IT game for about a quarter of a century. He has seen and written about the rise and fall of more than a few IT players and made many friends, some of whom he has even crossed swords with on occasions. Everything in this blog is purely Stan’s opinion so if you agree, wish to expand upon, correct a post or tell Stan he’s a clueless know nothing, please feel free.

Oracle Ubuntu Linux deal speculation grows

by Stan Beer

Sunday, 22 October 2006

On the eve of the OracleWorld user conference, market watchers are divided on whether Oracle intends to make an announcement concerning its Linux plans. However, I believe it's a fair bet that Oracle is working on incorporating Ubuntu Linux into its own product. Some analysts say Oracle is going to announce a move to offer its own Linux product based on the Ubuntu distro, others say that it will announce an alliance with Red Hat, and still others say it will make no announcement at all. All of the speculation is based on the musings of Oracle founder Larry Ellison back in April when he said words to the effect that he would like Oracle to own the entire software stack. In an interview with CNET News, Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Ubuntu Linux developer Canonical, would not comment on the question of whether an Ubuntu Linux partnership with Oracle is in the pipeline. What is one to make of a "no comment" answer to a direct question? If Canonical wasn't working with Oracle on some sort of Ubuntu plan, he would have said no. Why would Shuttleworth leave the question open to speculation if nothing was happening? The obvious conclusion would seem to be that something is happening. Oracle and Canonical are either in discussions or a deal has alreay been struck. After a deal earlier this year with Sun Microsystems to run Ubuntu alongside Solaris on low-end SPARC servers, it appears that Ubuntu is emerging as a favorite Linux flavour among large vendors. Ubuntu happens to be one of the easiest to install and manage Linux desktop distros and has become increasingly popular with home users of Linux in the past year, much to the chagrin of Novell and Red Hat. No doubt if I'm wrong about this, I'll get beaten up by readers but if I was a betting man, I would say that Oracle and Ubuntu is worth a punt.{moscomment} Tags See All Tags Deals  Linux  Open Source  Software  Powered By Joomla Tags Please enable JavaScript in your browser to post your comment!

 

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