I'm perplexed by Ellison's FT interview re: open source [1]. I only half believe him when he says that Red Hat doesn't own anything. Ellison is trying to cast a shadow on the Red Hat deal from two weeks ago, and, to me, it speaks volumes that he's so prepared to answer questions about the JBoss deal. Here's an illuminating (and perplexing) quote:

"... Why didn't we buy JBoss? Because we don't have to - if it ever got good enough we'd just take the intellectual property - just like Apache - embed it in our fusion middleware suite, and we're done. We always have that option available to us - IBM always has that option available to them."

Nonsense. Not buying JBoss was a mistake. Red Hat now owns the JBoss brand, owns a lucrative services operation, and employs a set of very talented and loyal developers. Ignoring the licensing differences for the moment, you won't just embed JBoss "and we're done"..."just like Apache", in fact, i'm pretty sure you are going to be cursing the fact that you didn't pay that premium you so swiftly dismiss in your interview. You see, once you are forced to "take the intellectual property" (which you can't anyway), your customers are going to start to wondering why they are paying Oracle so much for your "fusion middleware suite" when they could just get an fully integrated solution from Red Hat. And, if Red Hat were to purchase MySQL AB, you'd have a single corporation providing a fully integrated open-source solution for both LAMP and Enterprise Java. Ellison - two big ships on the horizon Red Hat and MySQL (which is growing up faster than you can say "solid enterprise class database"). Sleepycat and InnoDB acquisitions notwithstanding, this is still an interesting game of chess.

This interview puts Ellison's strategy on the table: he's making the argument that companies like Red Hat don't "own anything" and that open source isn't "good enough" yet. Plus, there's been some nefarious speculation about Red Hat being the next SCO courtesy of a perfectly timed opinion piece at Eweek masquerading as "news" [2]. Oracle passed on the JBoss deal, and now they want us to think that there are "IP ownership" issues with JBoss code. Don't believe the hype.

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