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Ellison: Oracle looked at buying Novell
And the company may be readying its own open source offering...

By Jo Best

Published: Tuesday 18 April 2006

Oracle boss Larry Ellison has revealed that his company considered a takeover of Novell and may soon enter into the Linux market itself.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Ellison said JBoss had also made overtures towards Oracle before the company was eventually snapped up by Red Hat.

He said: "JBoss wanted to sell the company to us. Clearly if we wanted to buy JBoss we'd have bought JBoss. Why didn't we buy JBoss? Because we don't have to - if it ever got good enough we'd just take the intellectual property - just like Apache - embed it in our fusion middleware suite, and we're done."

While an acquisition of JBoss didn't float Ellison's boat, the Oracle head sat down with other open source companies, with a takeover in mind.

He told the FT: "I've had this discussion with the CEOs of open source companies. We've looked at buying some, some with very high price tags - but since we already have access to all the intellectual property, why wouldn't we just embed this technology in our technology and provide support."

According to the Oracle boss, Novell had been temporarily in Oracle's crosshairs but bids were binned due to potential risk. A Red Hat buy was also rejected by Ellison.

He said: "I don't see how we could possibly buy Red Hat. We see in China and India, all that stuff is freely available and Red Hat is just cut completely out of the market. I'm not gong to spend $5bn, or $6bn, for something that can just be so completely wiped off the map."

While an acquisition may not be on the cards for the company any time soon, Ellison confirmed that Linux is writ large in the company's future and Oracle may soon get its own open source venture off the ground.

Ellison said: "Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane. Keep in mind it's not that good in most places yet. We're a big supporter of Linux. At some point we may embed Linux in all of our products and provide support... At some point we could very well choose to have Linux as part of the Oracle database server. We certify it, we test it."