Come on, Matt. It's called Unbreakable Linux. I haven't heard about any usability issues.
My experience in the open source world causes me to look at absolute download numbers with some caution. To the extent that the numbers include downloads of Fedora or OpenSUSE, instead of the enterprise offerings, they compare apples to oranges. To the extent that they include downloads by existing users of new versions, they speak to the amount of time that has elapsed since the companies started distributing, and not to new adoption.
By way of disclosure for your readers, I work at Oracle. Despite that, I can't give you any insight into the psychology behind the Oracle numbers -- I haven't looked at them in detail. I will say that I don't personally see this as a fight with anyone.
Oracle's made, and continues to make, serious and valuable contributions to Linux. We're still doing everything we did before. Why would it be better for us to stop offering support for the operating system?

Actually, Mike, there have been a number of sources describing problems with Oracle's Linux offering. Try this, this, and this, for starters. But that's beside the point: you know that the core of what I was saying is that there hasn't been much demonstrated interest in Oracle's Linux.

There is, however, billions of dollars worth of support for your other products. I'm therefore puzzled as to why Oracle either a) can't package its own Linux (and not simply co-opt Red Hat's) or b) just accept that it need not own the OS to own the rest of the stack (and market).

Oracle is a great company. It has great engineers, a competitive mentality, and good products. There is no compelling reason to be the Linux also-ran, and the numbers clearly point to Oracle being a non-entity in its efforts to become a Linux vendor.

My GUESS.. the low amount of downloads has to do with the target user base.. Oracle = Dbase Admins..
Fedora (my fav) / Suse can be installed to do any job. Where im guessing most think of O Linux as data base only system.

Oracle's Linux downloads should be viewed in combination Red Hats since its the same code. Oracle wants to provide support for Linux and doesn't care where people download it from.

Oracle can provide support whether its downloaded from Red Hat or the Oracle site and only provides it as a convenience for new customers.

Most customers will get simply get updates by connecting to the Oracle network, not by downloading a new binary.

Oracle is in the Linux support business and not the Linux distribution business. Oracle provides updates and fixes to existing versions so there is less reason to download a complete binary and do a re-install jus to get a patch. That's one of the benefits of getting Oracle support.

The main problem that I've heard of is that Oracle is reputed to have really terrible support. This wouldn't be bad in a free product, as it's partially expected, and the community can ramp-up support, but in a commercial product where support is what's being paid for... well, it's not good.

I realize that this column was particularly about the freely downloadable Linux distribution, but the ONLY thing special about that (for now) is that it's the same one that you use with Oracle. If you aren't interested in buying Oracle, then the Linux distribution is less interesting than Debian Sarge. (But probably more interesting than Debian Potato.)

I.e., this is a distribution that is likely to stabilize and then remain unchanging for a long period of time. It isn't that interesting when it's new. If it survives, it will become more interesting as it ages. But there's the word "if".

World Domination aside, Oracle tends to be the only application on a server. Everyone benefits if the base OS for an Oracle server is preconfigured and optimized for that. Having one vendor for database and OS support is worth a try too. If I was deploying Oracle, I would go with Oracle Linux for Oracle servers, and RedHat Linux for the rest. Having the Oracle version derived from RedHat promises excellent interoperability (barring any stupid tricks), while getting out of the box performance tuning for Oracle.

Unlike Novell's MS deal, Unbreakable Linux is fully within the spirit of the GPL. May the best installation and support win.