Oracles Unbreakable Linux move caught the Linux community by surprise, but, for the most part, theyre seeing a silver lining to Oracles latest shocker. Red Hat, for example, made the best of the news that Oracle will take Red Hat Linux and support it at cut rates.
“The opportunity for open source just got bigger,” said spokesperson Leigh Day. “Oracles announcement further validates open source and Red Hats technical leadership. We will continue to optimize Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Oracle and compete on value and innovation.”
Kevin Carmony, CEO of Linspire, took a less optimistic view of the situation. This is “not good for Red Hat,” said Carmony. “Their stock is already down nearly 17 percent in after-market trading on this news. I guess it is, however, slightly better for Red Hat than if Oracle had gone with Debian or Ubuntu.”
Speaking of Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, had been talking earlier on the same day about a possible partnership with Oracle. Thats, no longer in Ubuntus the crystal ball.
Shuttleworth said, “Given [Oracles] new commitment to the Red Hat code base, I expect them to be less open to other OSVs [open software vendors] for a while until the results from their initiative are in.”