“It has come to the attention of the IT-Director editorial team
that the much anticipated launch of the Oracle Appliance – the
actual deliverable from the over-hyped Raw Iron announcements made
earlier in the year – is sorely lacking in one crucial area,
Linux.”
“Previously [Oracle CEO Larry] Ellison had mentioned that other
Unix operating systems like FreeBSD, HP-UX and Linux would all be
considered for inclusion as a microkernel set for the Raw Iron
Appliances – but now it would appear Oracle has shirked it’s
responsibilities and opted out of Linux for the Oracle8i
Appliance.”
“…because of the GPL (General Product License) attached to
Linux, Oracle would have been forced to put any enhancements into
the public domain. If this were to happen other DBMS vendors would
have been able to short cut the time to delivering other
competitive database engines. So it turns out that it was
really the lawyers that were unhappy with the Linux route. It
has also been suggested that there are other grey-areas in the
Linux GPL that would have been open to interpretation if Oracle had
continued down the original path – hence leaving Linux out of the
equation for, at least, the short term.”