Evidently Oracle CEO Larry Ellison aims to make Red Hat a red smear in the road.

He's doing something he's been threatening to do since April and that's to use open source against Red Hat - which apparently ticked him off royally when it bought JBoss. He's going to poach Red Hat's Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system - 'cause that's allowed under open source rules - remove any Red Hat trademarks, Oracle-ize the thing, put fixes in it faster than you can say "Squish, go to God," and support it for way less than what Red Hat charges.

Pretty much all of Red Hat's revenue stream is based on charging for support because the software is theoretically free. It brought in $278 million last year, peanuts to a guy who spent $20 billion expanding his business.

Ellison said stripping out Red Hat's trademarks, adding bug fixes and then recompiling the system would make it all legal.

Oracle's RHEL binaries will be free - something Red Hat doesn't allow for its enterprise code - and users don't have to be Oracle customers to buy support.

Calls to Red Hat went unanswered. The company responded to Oracle's frontal assault on its web site with a collection of denials of Ellison's assertions under the banner "Unfakeable Linux."

The move also adds a major new facet to Oracle's rivalry with Microsoft.

Oracle went live with its up2date sign-up system as Larry was making the announcement at Oracle OpenWorld Wednesday afternoon and it takes all of 90 seconds to switch from Red Hat or Novell to Oracle support. Wannabe Oracle customers can get credit for the remainder of their existing support contracts with Novell and Red Hat.

Larry called it "capitalism," a word not used very often in open source circles, when, in answer to a question, he denied that his move would kill off Red Hat. "We will have a better product at a lower price," he said, suggesting that it might inspire Red Hat to do the same.

As word spread Wednesday evening, Red Hat's already damaged stock price eroded like a mudslide in after-hours trading, down close to 17% at one point. An hour or so after the market opened the next morning it was down over 27% and closed down 24% so if Larry wants to pick it up on the cheap he can.

Red Hat's stock fell recently on fiscal second-quarter results that put billings lower than Wall Street liked.

The Oracle gambit is called Unbreakable Linux 2.0 and Larry suggested that it was the beginning of an Oracle Linux stack, something else he said he wanted in April, when he decided he couldn't stomach the notion of buying JBoss for $400 million or a Novell or Red Hat either because open source companies aren't worth their market cap.

Ellison claimed that Linux lacks real enterprise support and that Red Hat users can't get real-time fixes. Red Hat bugs, he said, are only fixed in future revs of the operating system. Oracle intends to remedy the situation by what he called "backporting" bug fixes to current, future and past releases.

He also intends to indemnify Premier support customers against any IP claims that the SCO Group might be able to make thanks to its claims that Linux stole Unix code it owns.

Whether that means Oracle has come to some kind of understanding with SCO is unclear, but Ellison claimed that the uncertainty that SCO's multibillion-dollar suit against IBM and its other litigation has engendered has slowed Linux adoption at many large concerns.

Users can stay current with Unbreakable Linux 2 for $99 a year per system no matter how big it is, a species of so-called network support that Red Hat doesn't offer.

Oracle's Basic Support, described as the same as the best Red Hat offers, is priced at $399 per system per year for a two CPU box - 60% less than Red Hat - and $999 for servers with more than two CPUs.

Oracle's Premier support, which Ellison described as the same as the best support he provides his database customers - and completely out of Red Hat's league - will run $1,199 per system per year for a two CPU server and $1,999 for bigger machines. Only Premier clients can get the back port fixes, starting with RHEL3 on x86 and x86-64 architectures.

To kick-start the venture, Oracle is offering its customers a free trial for the next 90 days and non-Oracle customers will be able to get any of the gradations of support for 50% off list.

Ellison said that it was not his intention to fragment Linux. Oracle's Red Hat will stay synchronized with the original Red Hat and Oracle's fixes will be made available to Red Hat and Novell. It will be up to them whether they incorporate them into their distributions. Oracle, however, might add packages that Red Hat doesn't have, he said, which sounds on the face of it mighty like a fork. One might expect they'd support Oracle widgetry.

Oracle product will continue to be certified on Red Hat, SUSE and Asianux

The scheme fetched words of endorsement from the presidents and CEOs of Dell, Intel, HP, Accenture, AMD, Bearing Point, EMC, BMC, NetApp, Autodesk and Mercury. Even IBM backed the plan. Ellison claimed it answered customer demand. Michael Dell said Dell was using Unbreakable Linux 2.0 internally. Even if Oracle support isn't as highly rated as Red Hat's.

Oracle has 7,000 support people worldwide who speak 27 languages and a dedicated engineering team. It is promising comprehensive testing and optimization of Linux with third-party hardware, storage, networking and drivers.

It is also promising to support the entire software stack of enterprise applications, middleware, database and operating system. Services include installation, configuration and deployment.

Oracle chief corporate architect Edward Screven denied widespread reports that Oracle was thinking of running with the Ubuntu species of Linux. "We have never talked to Ubuntu," he said.

Oracle was the first commercial database on Linux in 1998 and contributed the Oracle Cluster File System that is now part of the Linux kernel 2.6.16. Linux is key to Oracle's grid strategy.

Meanwhile, Oracle announced Wednesday that it had joined the Free Standards Group (FSG) as a Platinum member. It said it would contribute to FSG's Linux Standard Base (LSB) workgroup, which is supposed to make it possible for all Linux distributions to run the same applications software without fragmenting.

-- Copyright Client/Server News