Is Novell the next SCO? At least Bruce Perens thinks so. Only time will tell what good will come out of this for Novell. So far the history of companies that fared well when striking deals with MS are thin layered.

The timing is also most interesting. SCO's case is nearing its end and the Oracle Linux release just happened. I wonder what IBM is thinking now as they are the one that pushed Novell into buying Suse and Ximian. And why has there not been any reaction or opinion on the deal from them?

I'm running behind on the facts here, but a lot of stuff is certainly happening in Linux land the last few weeks. One of the more important things is the Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Linux, or whatever they want to call it.

At this point in time it is a Red Hat rip-off, plain and simple. Hell it barely makes sense to have this product around in it's current form. What is Oracle trying to prove or achieve with this?
They certainly have no Linux reputation, other then releasing their main product (database) for it. The possibility that they provide better support then RH seems questionable to say the least. It is after all just a copy, so why not get support from the creators directly? Lastly, If you are concerned about the costs and do not really want support you just might as well install CentOS and if really needed, get cheaper support from your local Linux vendor.

No, what I would have expected, and what I hope this Oracle Linux will grow to is a lean, mean, data munching, IO crunching database version. Designed and tuned by Oracle to run their ruling database on it, and nothing else. Just like VMware uses Linux in some products.