Everyone should keep in mind Oracle's two part plan on open source:
- Part 1 - gain an operating system by attempting to hijack the work that Red Hat did to build a quality product, strong community with Fedora, brand, subscription model, and ecosystem.
- Part 2 - try to kill Red Hat, in doing Part 1, to show the world that open source software companies can not make money, and to slow the investments that VC's are making in open source software companies. Since there are open source software companies making databases, middleware, and applications now, these guys feel the ankle nipping on all three of their business lines. They want to send a message to VC's that open source is a bad investment.

Luckily for open source, and the end cusotmer market, the world does not trust these guys, and Red Hat and other open source vendors have already created a large enough footprint and market impact. This is an area where Oracle thinks they are smarter than they are.

Half of Oracle is scared to death of Oracle, and the other half dismiss them as "not compeition". That's a great spot for MySQL.

I think it's interesting to think back to all the people who predicted the swift demise of RedHat when Oracle decided to release their own tweaked version of RHEL as "Unbreakable Linux". My prediction was then (and still is): Oracle may gain some traction with their release of Linux, at least with people already buying Oracle database software, but it will hardly come at the expense of Red Hat. They may have actually taken some RH sales and caused a dent in their income for a quarter or two, but I don't think it was significant. Again, for people who are building a database server, they may want to combine their DB and OS purchases (where it REALLY makes sense to buy the two together, to guarantee clean integration), but I doubt many people are just buying Unbreakable Linux for any other purpose. People trust Red Hat now. Oracle, of all people, should know that people are willing to pay MEGA$$$ for a product they know and trust.