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Oracle's Ellison has Linux envy

Martin LaMonica Former Staff writer, CNET News
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer covering green tech and cutting-edge technologies. He joined CNET in 2002 to cover enterprise IT and Web development and was previously executive editor of IT publication InfoWorld.
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Martin LaMonica

Oracle has considered acquiring a Linux distributor in order to sell a full "stack" of software, company CEO Larry Ellison told the Financial Times.

The comments, published on Sunday, offer insight into how the company may react to Red Hat's acquisition of JBoss, an open-source middleware company.

Most of Oracle's Linux software runs on Red Hat Linux. Red Hat's purchase of JBoss, which competes with Oracle's middleware line, could strain the Oracle-Red Hat partnership.

Indeed, Ellison said the Red Hat-JBoss combination poses problems.

"Now that Red Hat...competes with us in middleware, we have to re-look at the relationship--so does IBM," he told the Financial Times.

Red Hat is the largest Linux distributor, followed by Novell.

"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."