While the world holds its breath waiting to see if Oracle is serious about entering the Linux market. Novell and Oracle staff are putting a zipper on their beaks about the matter.

For the past two years, Oracle has been flagging the fact that all of its development has been taking place on Linux. Monica Kumar, principal manager of Oracle's Linux Program Office within the Platform Technologies Division at Oracle Corporation, stressed last month to iTWire how important Linux is to Oracle's development plans while she was at LinuxWorld Australia. And recently, CEO Larry Ellison mused how he would really like to own every piece of the IT software stack. The only thing missing is a Linux distribution.

The quickest way to hit the ground running with a Linux distro is to buy one, which Ellison well knows. He could buy Red Hat which has just bought the JBoss middleware outfit. However, Red Hat has not delivered a viable desktop product and it will cost more than $5 billion to buy. Novell, on the other hand is cheaper at around $3 billion and has the closest thing on the market to a saleable Linux desktop with Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED). It's new release of SLED, which is tipped to be the breakthrough product, is just three months away. This is the
perfect time for Oracle to strike.

Meanwhile, both Oracle and Novell staff that we talk to just giggle, wink and say no comment. Unless, of course Ellison has tossed us all a giant red herring.{moscomment}

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