Oracle appears to have had little luck finding takers for its enterprise distro since first releasing it in 2006. The release came about as an apparent move to punish Red Hat for its acquisition of open-source middleware provider JBoss, which Oracle saw as a move into its territory by a company it had considered as something of a partner. In other words, Oracle Linux, essentially a slightly modified clone of RHEL, began life as one side of a tit for tat – as Oracle’s way of saying, “Two can play at that game, buster.”