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From the “Why buy when you can build your own?” files:
There is a lot of speculation out now about Oracle wanting to acquire Red Hat. It’s a deal that makes no sense to me personally and one that I don’t think is likely to happen anytime soon.
For one, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) has already demonstrated that it can take Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) products and — through the open source licensing terms — rebrand them.
Oracle Enterprise Linux is essentially Red Hat Enterprise Linux, just taken by Oracle and stripped of Red Hat’s trademarks. Oracle clearly doesn’t need to buy Red Hat for its software, since by definition, Red Hat’s software is open source.
Oracle could, however, stand to benefit from buying Red Hat’s customers and support — but considering that Red Hat is a strategic platform play for a number of vendors (including Cisco, HP, IBM and Dell), I just don’t see it.
On the other hand, there is another strategic open source vendor that I think might make a really good fit for Oracle — namely, commercial PHP vendor Zend.