Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux…All about Microsoft?

I had lunch with a friend today that is making me reconsider some of my previous comments on Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux moves. I still think the company went about it in the wrong way, but it makes more sense to me now.

What If Oracle’s move against Red Hat was not about Red Hat at all? What if it was in response to the Microsoft threat?

Mark Shuttleworth made the point that the difference between $0.00 and $0.01 is huge, at least perceptually. Whatever Oracle’s Windows market share today, that share will undoubtedly fall over the next few years as SQL Server continues to gain market share.

Oracle therefore needs to shore up its market share on Linux, which becomes easier the lower the price of Linux becomes. Price aside, tying Linux into the Oracle database and applications in a similar way to how Microsoft ties its products into Windows makes a lot of sense.

Red Hat, then, could be a casualty in a larger fight: the fight between Oracle and Microsoft.

This doesn’t explain why Oracle didn’t work with Red Hat on this strategy rather than against it. (Perhaps it did – I can’t imagine that Red Hat would have taken kindly to Oracle’s suggestion that it, not Oracle, drop its prices….) And it doesn’t explain why Oracle simply didn’t adopt Ubuntu to replace “even cheaper Red Hat Enterprise Linux” with “absolutely free” Ubuntu (though Mike Olson discusses this and provides a reasonable response).

But it does highlight what’s at stake. Linux matters. It is foundational technology to much of the world’s infrastructure (the Internet, enterprise IT, etc.), and it deeply matters who owns it. I suspect that, at its core, Oracle’s strategy is less about price and more about control of this critical component of the 21st Century’s dominant infrastructure. At least, control within its own stack.