Net Results: It's certainly been a fascinating couple of weeks for Linux. First, there was Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison's surprise announcement that he would be grinding Red Hat Linux under his heel - oops! I mean going head to head with Red Hat by offering its own version of Red Hat Linux free of charge and offering support at half the price Red Hat does.
Shortly thereafter, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer was boisterously shaking hands with Novell chief executive Ron Hovsepian, as they sealed a deal to offer interoperability with Novell's SUSE distribution of Linux, all in the name of customer peace, love and understanding.
Linux fans may view the new Linux landscape as a sure sign of the adoption and continuing growth of the markets for their favourite open source system. But the rapid shifts are also a sign of a new maturity in how the mainstream software companies see Linux OS and indicate that there's a tussle for who controls the growth and expansion of this market - and that means the larger companies like Oracle, IBM, Novell and Microsoft, not the small vendors like Red Hat.
Red Hat, which has had an admirable 42 per cent growth in 2006 in revenue and a 75 per cent growth in profits, has become a small scale but potentially significant threat to companies like Microsoft.
And, for that matter, a threat to Oracle. While Oracle had been a longtime partner for Red Hat - the latter having about 60 per cent of the Linux server market - naughty Red Hat showed ambitions above its station and went and bought JBoss. JBoss makes an open source Java application server - which means Red Hat could start to offer its own "stack" or operating system plus integrated applications, and compete directly with Oracle on its own ground, rather than Red Hat acting as a convenient "third world supplier of raw materials", as Information Week's Charles Babcock has it.
Despite the healthy figures for Red Hat, a lot of people feel the company's growth has been too slow, which means the growth of the Linux market has been too slow.
Ellison rattled off a set of reasons during his keynote two weeks ago at Oracle OpenWorld, citing uncertainties about code ownership (a small company, SCO, has claimed it owns some of the code currently in Linux and therefore, everyone using it owes them licence fees) and the availability of enterprise-level support for an operating system that doesn't belong to anybody directly and was created, and continues to be maintained, by an amorphous group of developers around the world.
And then there are the bugs. The question of bug fixes "is the most serious problem confronting the Linux community today. It's slowing the adoption of Linux," Ellison said.
So the number two software company in the world decided it would take Red Hat Linux, strip out all the copyright elements, add in regular bug fixes, recompile the code and let anyone download it from its website.
Red Hat shares plunged 24 per cent the day after Ellison's speech and you wonder if the little company will keep on going. Probably not by only offering a distribution of Linux plus support, its current game plan - it will need to compete by venturing further into the acquisitions area and offering a bigger picture of open source offerings.
On the other hand, Oracle's cunning plan has inadvertently crowned the Red Hat distribution as the de facto king in its market and many customers may wish to stay with the home team rather than moving to a database-plus company for its Linux.
And what about the Novell-Microsoft love-in? That deal also caught many by surprise given that the two have been busy suing each other over copyright issues. Salt Lake City-based Novell has been an underdog, struggling to find a new role for itself as an open source oriented company though its purchase of SUSE Linux - which trails Red Hat with about 10 per cent of the enterprise server market. But Novell is showing some modest, promising revenue growth.
Indeed that may very well be what makes Novell, and Novell's version of Linux, attractive to Microsoft. As analysts have noted, SUSE tends to run on a lot of mainframes, and mainframes don't interest Microsoft. And SUSE is a small competitor in the enterprise server market. Whereas Red Hat is a direct Microsoft competitor, and growing. So it suits Steve to put the brakes on Red Hat through its deal with Novell, and it suits Microsoft to choose the lesser of the Linux evils if its customers, darn them, are going to insist on running Linux as well as Windows in their corporate environments, as they increasingly do. And it suits Novell to get a big partner to help spread SUSE in the enterprise space, to get a couple of nice pay-offs from Microsoft, and have its position in the market stabilise. Many expect the current lawsuits to disappear quietly as well.
I asked Tom Francese, Novell executive president for worldwide sales, why Novell was making this move now, and he replied, "Why not? This is an unprecedented announcement and I think we're in an unprecedented time. And this announcement is based around the notion that the customer comes first, and is more market-driven then anything."
In a slantwise reference to the copyright lawsuits with Microsoft, Francese notes that the market wants "to get the cloud in the marketplace removed". Both companies are pushing interoperability: Microsoft because it has to join what it cannot beat, but join in its own way and its own time; Novell because it knows customers want to run both operating systems and it cannot simply take on the Windows juggernaut. Hence it will give Microsoft coupons that it can hand out to its customers to get SUSE Linux support, which means Microsoft customers can be assured of enterprise level Linux support.
Francese notes, however, that Novell is "a desktop to data centre offering with the same code" and that Novell will continue to compete vigorously with Microsoft on other fronts.
For those of us who find this clash and consolidation between the mainstream tech titans and grassroots open source companies fascinating, the past month has been an affirmation that we ain't seen nothing yet as the Linux market goes ever more mainstream.
It's as if the Greens were talking coalition government with the PDs. I can't wait to see what happens next.
