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Red Hat's Fleury: 'Oracle Linux' unlikely

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
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Fresh off an investor tour, Marc Fleury, the general manager of Red Hat's JBoss division, argued that talk of Oracle offering its own Linux distribution is more speculation than reality.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison in made comments that led many people to believe that Oracle would offer its own Linux. An announcement was rumored to be scheduled for LinuxWorld earlier this month but never did.

Fleury, in a lengthy Web post, makes the case that it's not going to happen. He added that Wall Street investors asked the question more than once.

He argues that if Oracle were to create its own distribution, it would take a great deal of time and resources to build and support.

And if Oracle were to fork Red Hat Linux, Red Hat has a big advantage of having a large number of applications already certified to run on Red Hat Linux, Fleury said. As a result, he said that Red Hat will likely remain independent.

"I believe we are seeing a Nash Equilibrium in action. If there is a set of strategies with the property that no player can benefit by changing his or her strategy while the other players keep their strategies unchanged, then that set of strategies and the corresponding payoffs constitute the Nash Equilibrium. A simple way to describe this is the popular saying 'nobody move and nobody gets hurt,'' he wrote.

Asked about Oracle's intentions in Linux, Oracle's vice president of technology marketing Robert Shimp earlier this month noted that Oracle already offers customers direct support for Red Hat Linux, saying that having a single vendor for many products is very valuable.

As to Ellison's comments, Shimp said that those were made in the context of open-source companies and acquisitions. That is, because of the General Public License, Oracle does not need to acquire an open-source company to offer Linux support.

"He was just making an observation about acquisitions," Shimp said.

Meanwhile, former JBoss CEO Fleury in his post admitted that he did at least meet with the Oracle CEO at one point. Before being bought by Red Hat, it was .

"For the record, sitting down with one of the 10 richest men on the planet to discuss "meta-data" structures was an enjoyable experience I am grateful to have had," Fleury said.