The Open Road

By announcing that it has open-sourced its Launchpad project under the Affero GPL version 3, a year after rumors swirled that it would, has Canonical licensed away one of its best revenue opportunities?

Roughly two years ago, I walked up London's High Road from Seven Sisters Tube Station with Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Mark and I talked about a range of things, but one of the things that particularly caught my attention was Launchpad, a collaboration and hosting platform for open-source projects that makes it easy to track code, ideas, and other things across projects.

Then, as now, Launchpad struck me as a fertile field for Canonical to discover a scalable, winning business model to support Ubuntu development. In fact, I remember a long conversation with open-source guru Larry Augustin about Launchpad. Augustin felt that there was a great business lurking in Launchpad.

I agreed.

While I can see how "opening up Launchpad gives the free-software world the beginnings of an open, programmatic interface to its own infrastructure," as Canonical speculates, I'm struggling to see how it helps Canonical make money. Any chance of directly monetizing Launchpad is effectively gone now.

That, of course, may not be the point. Canonical has been experimenting with other models, including hosted services that may well be augmented by this move.

As RedMonk analyst James Governor suggests, "(It may be) possible to make money as a tools company, without owning the runtime, if you offer hosting for the apps. IDE (integrated development environment) + cloud = dollars." Open source may help to make Launchpad more widely used, which, in turn, better positions it to be a Canonical-sponsored on-ramp to the Canonical-monetized cloud.

Not a bad idea. (Certainly better than the apperi-sponsored Ubuntu application store, as reported by The VAR Guy.)

It does suggest, however, that Canonical may be placing a lot of eggs in the cloud basket, a basket that has yet to prove that it can deliver solid, consistent returns to software companies. It comes with its own baggage, as Jonathan Zittrain writes).

Time will tell if the cloud can feed Canonical's employees. But Shuttleworth isn't the sort of person to do something just because all the "in" kids are open-sourcing these days. Licensing Launchpad under the AGPL version 3 is a calculated move. We just don't know what the calculus will yield quite yet.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Google becomes more like Microsoft every day. It used to be that only Microsoft could pre-announce a product to mass hysteria (and mass exodus of start-ups dabbling in the area), then proceed to under-deliver for the first few iterations of the product and still make billions in the process. With Google Chrome OS, Google has signaled that it, too, can over-commit and under-deliver and still mint billions.

Perhaps equally dismaying, as Anil Dash suggests, is that Google may be having "its Microsoft moment" and starting to develop software to work nicely with its other software...rather than actually building software that its customers want.

But let's step back and strip away the frenzied media response to Google Chrome OS to determine what, exactly, Google announced: Google announced that it was shipping Ubuntu.

No, Google isn't calling it Ubuntu, but Chrome OS is nothing more than the promise of an Ubuntu fork. Given that we have Ubuntu and plenty of other Ubuntu forks today, what's the big deal?

Heck, for that matter, we also have Jolicloud, another Linux fork that promises to be an "Internet operating system" for Netbooks, just like Chrome OS. (Ubuntu makes largely the same claim.)

The difference, of course, is that you can actually use Jolicloud today (alpha version), unlike Chrome OS, and I'm actually typing this on an Ubuntu-based Netbook. (Incidentally, you've got to think that Jolicloud's investors were kicking themselves last week when Google announced Chrome OS a day after they announced Jolicloud's funding.)

So, Google will ship an Ubuntu fork, but one that presumably will come with its own secret sauce. Why? Well, as CNET's Rafe Needleman generously suggests, because "The stakes are big enough that it's worth the shot for Google."

Maybe. Maybe not.

Let's assume "Maybe." This still leaves Google with the stated intent to tackle a Lilliputian market that only the Linux crowd seems to get excited about, which is why Barron's slaps the idea around:

I think Google misunderstands the nature of netbooks, which simply are small, cheap, lightweight PCs. Early versions ran Linux, and didn't sell. Once the netbook companies loaded them with Windows, sales picked up. On its last earnings call, Microsoft noted that the attach rate for Windows on netbooks had reached 90%. The people have spoken. Netbooks are a misnomer; while people do use them to connect with the Web, they use them for a lot of other things. Customers want netbooks to run standard software, including Office. And I doubt there will ever be a version of Office for Chrome OS.

Of course they won't support Microsoft Office. They're going to support Google Docs! (See "Microsoft moment" above.) Much as I like Google Docs, and much as I like OpenOffice and a range of alternatives to Microsoft Office, the reality is that if you don't support Microsoft Office, you automatically limit the market appeal of your operating system, a lesson Apple learned. Apple's support for Office was the beginning of its rise within enterprise computing.

It's just incredibly hard to overcome the inertia of an incumbent in an established market. Google looks smart when it is changing the rules for computing (giving search away and charging for ads, moving e-mail to the cloud, etc.), but when it competes with Microsoft on its terms...it's likely going to lose. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler gives a hint as to why. (Spoiler: It's the installed base, stupid):

New markets on the Web can emerge and grow really quickly. There's lots of opportunity for something like Facebook to take over in just a few years. But that's not really the case for PCs and desktop software. The installed base is just really, really large, and the growth and upgrade cycle are much much slower than with Web services.

Firefox has been the most successful piece of desktop software to ever challenge Microsoft's offering. We started the effort 10 years ago and finally arrived at a successful product 5 years ago and in the 5 years since we shipped that product, we've managed to gain about 300 million users and a quarter of Web browsing usage.

Apple has been the most successful operating system to challenge Microsoft ever and they've managed in the 8+ years of OS X availability to grab only about 5% of the global OS installed base.

It's just not fast or easy to move a market that's more than a billion large. Anyone that thinks that major change can happen in months, or even a couple of years, doesn't understand this space very well.

Google came out with a new browser (Chrome) some time ago, and still barely scrapes 2 percent market share. (Fake Steve Jobs says this is because "Chrome is [crap]," but I think it has more to do with the difficulty of changing consumer behavior.) Firefox has done better, but even Firefox is an example of just how hard it is to fight an incumbent on its terms, particularly when the incumbent is perceived to be "good enough," as CIO.co.uk editor Martin Veitch notes.

It won't help that Google doesn't look or behave in the way enterprises demand, as ZDNet's Larry Dignan writes.

In sum, Google has a lot to prove, and doesn't have a track record of churning out hits. It has one significant moneymaker, whereas Microsoft has two, one of which Google is now targeting with Chrome OS. It's going to get ugly, but I suspect Google may be the company that ends up with the black eye. As an open-source advocate, I'd like it to be otherwise, but I just can't see enough differentiation in Google's approach to suggest it will be more successful than others before it.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

In May, I reported on the rising fortunes of Funambol, Mozilla, and other open-source companies. Signs of "green shoots" notwithstanding, the economy doesn't seem to be getting any better, but open-source companies continue to log impressive growth as open source pervades the enterprise, as Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond (@jhammond) recently noted.

Importantly, according to Hammond, while open source starts as a cost-saving exercise, it often morphs into something far more strategic:

[O]rganizations tend to start [with the goal of saving money with open source]. And then what tends to happen is the more that they become comfortable with using open source, and the more that they apply it successfully, the more they start to realize that there are benefits other than cost savings that they can take advantage of. And that's when you start to see them turn from open source opportunists into open source advocates.

Those "advocates" are funding the payrolls of a range of open-source companies. Here are just a few examples of those benefiting from this enterprise shift to open source:

• The VAR Guy (@thevarguy) reports that both xTuple and Sopera are profitable. While he doesn't comment on how much they're doing in sales, profitability is, in itself, a significant achievement. (Alfresco, my company, is also profitable, and I'm sure there are others. Please let me know.)
• Likewise, an open-source authentication and identity management company, announced that it is on track to record 100-percent sales growth in 2009. We'll call that a "pre-announcement."
• MuleSource, an open-source Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) company, reported "another record for the company, with a 140 percent year-over-year increase in quarterly bookings and over 100 percent growth for the year-to-date period."
• (Credit: MindTouch)
  MindTouch, not to be outdone, also issued a release highlighting its revenue growth (without giving any gee-whiz statistics but did us the favor of providing a pretty graph). More interesting, however, is MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson's (@roebot) review of the various things the company has done right and wrong in commercializing its open-source collaboration project (Spoiler: favoring an enterprise build over a "community build" via stability and support is a bad idea).
• Meanwhile, though not financial reports, it's encouraging to see Kuali adoption take off in earnest within higher education. "The colleges involved say they have the potential to achieve millions in savings while gaining more control over technology systems that are essential to the smooth functioning of their institutions." Nice.
• Also, a member of the Perl community looks to Canonical's Ubuntu in search of a solid revenue model for Perl. Interesting read, though I'd probably look to foundations that have proved their financial mettle like Mozilla and Eclipse before I'd emulate Ubuntu, however much I may respect what Canonical is doing with Ubuntu.

Unfortunately, most open-source companies are private so the "earnings" reports are somewhat self-serving and mostly unverifiable. Still, it's good to hear of growth in the midst of a weak economic climate.

Disclosure: I am an adviser to MindTouch and MuleSource. I'll gladly report on other financial successes in the open-source world if you care to send them to me....

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

On Sunday I tried calling Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, to warn him that Google was going to announce a competitor to Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Alas, he wasn't answering.

Turning to the sports news, I understood why:

Shuttleworth, masquerading as Roger Federer, had just beaten Andy Roddick to win Wimbledon and beat his own record for most Grand Slam singles titles in men's tennis history.

Not bad for a computer geek.

Shuttleworth was, of course, the first African in space, but it's nice to see him getting some exercise and devoting himself to terrestrial pursuits from time to time.

Of course, it's possible that the whole Ubuntu thing is actually Federer's claim to fame. Perhaps Federer is the real open-source geek-cum-tennis pro while Shuttleworth is the sham?

Think I'm making this up? Well, consider: when was the last time you saw the two together? You haven't, right?

Neither have I. Whenever Federer and I hang out, Shuttleworth is always curiously absent, yet shows up soon after Federer leaves.

Some people think Roger Federer and Mark Shuttleworth simply look like each other. But I'm not fooled. I know the truth.

They're one and the same.

Or maybe they're twin brothers separated at birth.

;-)

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay. But notice the timestamps: you'll never find me Twittering at the same time as Richard Stallman. Coincidence?

It was just a matter of time before Google stopped pretending it doesn't compete with Microsoft and introduce its own operating system to go head-to-head against Microsoft. As reported by CNET, Google has now lifted the covers on its Google Chrome OS, "an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks."

That's funny. We already have several of those, each of them running the same code powering Chrome OS, as Glyn Moody reminds us. They're called Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Moblin, and...you get the point.

More specifically, while Google claims Chrome OS looks to the future of a Web-friendly OS, this is precisely the future that Canonical's Ubuntu has been envisioning and actively courting. It's therefore not surprising that Ubuntu enthusiasts like Renai LeMay ask why Google apparently elected to "splinter the Linux community" rather than "leverage the stellar work already carried out by [Ubuntu]."

Why indeed?

Well, because Google clearly wants to pull a Microsoft. Yes, Google has stated that "[a]ll web-based applications will automatically work," and not just on Chrome OS, as doing otherwise would be suicide, but you can bet that Google will fine-tune its own applications to privilege their performance on its OS...just as Microsoft has. At least Microsoft doesn't ask the open-source community to help it in such work.

Google may well be focused on simply creating a "delivery mechanism for a web browser," but as Gunnar Hellekson opines, there are far more efficient ways to do so. Hellekson goes on:

Google keeps dropping these code bombs on the [open-source] community -- that's a really expensive way to produce something nobody wants to help with.

In short, don't expect the open-source community to do Google's work for it, work that Google may not be particularly well-suited to do.

All that said, I'm glad to see more competition in operating systems, and think Google will do a lot to help push the state of the art, just as it has in browsers. But let's be clear: Google's announcement is neither cause for widespread elation (open-source world) or fear (Redmond). As ZDNet's Dennis Howlett explains:

Where's the secret sauce here other than the Google halo effect painted over with the browser and duly hyped by the SV Google lovers?...[T]he reality is no one outside the Silicon Valley tech bubble gives a damn what operating system and browser they use. Many are still mandated to use IE6 as a colleague reminded me the other day. Simply having Google wave its hand is not going to sway hard nosed enterprise buyers - even if it is free. Which neatly brings me to another point.

Google has said it wants to get help from the open source community. I'll bet they do. All those drivers that [TechCrunch editor Michael] Arrington dismisses with a wave of the hand WILL need to be served. If he thinks I'm wrong then a quick call to any of the major banks' CTO offices should put him straight on that one....Even...when ChromeOS does emerge it will be a v1.0. No enterprise buyer I know will go within a country mile of committing its users' kit to something at that level of maturity.

In other words, Chrome OS has a long way to go before we see it hit significant volume of adoption, no matter how good it ends up being, and particularly enterprise adoption.

As for how good it will be, Robin Yellow, a friend who works in IT for a Fortune 100 company, notes that "Google are a bunch of young people in California who ride Segways and wear their pajamas to work," which may not be the ideal bunch to create software that enterprises of the world want and will trust. That's a concern shared by Red Hat's director of product management, Rich Sharples, who worries: "What Linux needs is a true consumer-grade desktop - the Google experience still seems to be aimed at the tech savvy."

Google opted to "build" its own Linux distribution, rather than use a wildly popular, Web-focused OS like Ubuntu. It is doing so with a team that lacks Microsoft or Apple's flair for enterprise and consumer, respectively, and has asked for the open-source community to make up the difference.

Good luck with that. Open source does many things exceptionally well. End-user design doesn't tend to be one of them.

I respect Google's technological savvy. I respect even more the development chops of the open-source community. Unfortunately, I don't think either is a near-term, credible developer of a consumer-friendly OS that will motivate people to want to move from their Macs or Windows machines to adopt Google Chrome OS.

That's why I think CNET's Ina Fried should change her headline from "To challenge Google, Microsoft might want to think Apple," to "To challenge Microsoft, Google might want to think Apple." Google is the challenger, and the reality is that exceptional design, not merely technology advances, is what will drive consumer change.

If Google needs a reminder of this, it need look no farther than Android, its open-source alternative to Apple's iPhone OS, which is long on technology and short on success, precisely because it fails to understand and allure the consumer.

If Google really wants to leverage the power of open source and outdo Microsoft and Apple in ease of use, perhaps it should find a way to broaden the base of the open-source development community to include average users so that your mom, my brother, etc. can provide feedback on how to improve ease-of-use of Chrome OS. Now that would be innovative.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Microsoft has divided opinion in the open-source world for years with its love/mostly hate relationship with open source. While the company has seemingly warmed up to open source in the past two years, its continued patent club has hung over projects like Linux. On Monday Microsoft sheathed the club for the open-source Mono project, but arguably needs to go much further to justify celebrations.

Despite Microsoft's patent claims against open source over the years, it has chosen a few favorites to exclude from the taint of infringement, Mono chief among them. Mono enables .Net applications to run on Linux and almost certainly steps on Microsoft patents in the process. In November 2006 Microsoft and Novell, the primary company behind Mono development, consummated an interoperability agreement that included protection of Mono developers, but under fairly strict terms and only for Novell customers.

Mono was open source, in other words, but only usable for a select class of developer.

It therefore surprised some when Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution and an ardent opponent of software patents, decided to include Mono in its standard distribution. The company publicly defended its decision and, in my opinion, was right to do so. It's simply a matter of pragmatism, as John Mark Walker points out because "if we ditched all free software for possible patent violations, we'd have nothing left."

Now Microsoft has ostensibly made everything easier for Ubuntu and the rest of the Mono-using world, by pledging not to assert its patents against Mono developers, distributors, and users (i.e., those that implement C# and CLI, ECMA specifications 334 and 335, as Mono does).

While Mon's chief developer Miguel de Icaza celebrated Microsoft's decision ("I am overflowing with joy right now"), Dana Blankenhorn asks if Microsoft's Mono moment will end up fracturing the open-source movement (or, at least, the Free Software Foundation and Ubuntu). Meanwhile, Sean Michael Kerner queries whether Mono will benefit from Microsoft's promise not to be Microsoft and threaten the world with patent-infringement suits.

Ultimately, however, the real question is, "Who cares?" As IBM's Bob Sutor, vice president of Linux and Open Source, suggests, Mono is small change compared to Linux:

With Microsoft making promises about Mono, they should pledge that they will not assert their necessary patents against the Linux kernel.

Bingo. Mono is small change. Linux is big money. If Microsoft can overcome its allergic reaction to Linux, we might actually be making progress.

Microsoft's Mono decision is an example of Microsoft discovering it needn't squash the small child it has already invited to play in its sandbox. Extending its "Community Promise" to Linux would demonstrate that the company is committed to joining the 21st Century and competing on the basis of its technical merits against Linux, rather than its patent portfolio.

The U.S. patent system being as messy as it is, it's certain that Linux violates Microsoft patents...just as it's certain Microsoft violates Linux-related patents held by IBM and other Linux proponents. It's time to call a cease-fire and get back to delivering value, not intellectual property promises and threats, to customers.

Update 9:17 a.m. PDT: I inadvertently conflated Microsoft's Community Promise to extending to Mono, rather than the ECMA standards 334 and 335.

Carlo Daffara, an open-source consultant, rightly notes that Microsoft's patent promise is not directly on Mono, but rather on these ECMA standards, which leaves "most of Mono...encumbered as before (WinForms, ADO.NET, ...)."

Mono founder Miguel de Icaza recognizes this and plans to deal with it:

Astute readers will point out that Mono contains much more than the ECMA standards, and they will be correct. In the next few months we will be working towards splitting the jumbo Mono source code that includes ECMA + A lot more into two separate source code distributions. One will be ECMA, the other will contain our implementation of ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Winforms and others.

It's a useful distinction, but doesn't detract from the original premise (if anything, it amplifies it): Microsoft has taken baby steps toward competing with open-source projects like Mono and Linux on technical merit, but it needs to do far more. Granting its "Promise" to Linux would be a big step in the right direction.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Oracle doesn't want to own Linux. Oracle just wants Linux to be cheap.

That's the insight an analyst shared with me the other day as we discussed why Oracle hasn't made a move to acquire Red Hat (recently, anyway). According to this source, who is familiar with Oracle's Linux plans, Oracle wins eight of 10 deals where the operating system is Linux, and only wins five of 10 where the OS is Windows, a win rate that continues to drop as Microsoft's SQL Server gets better.

Oracle's Enterprise Linux strategy is therefore not so much about neutralizing a threat from Red Hat as it is establishing its own threat against Microsoft, a thought that others have highlighted.

Indeed, Oracle's Wim Coekaerts has declared that if Red Hat Enterprise Linux were free, Oracle would exit the market for Linux entirely.

Red Hat isn't likely to drop its pricing for RHEL anytime soon, at least, not for Oracle, but the reality is that Oracle already has a way to offer a popular, enterprise-quality Linux distribution for free, or close thereto. It's called Ubuntu.

The only thing Ubuntu lacks, as I've written, is the blessing of a major enterprise software vendor. Oracle could grant that blessing. All it would need to do is start offering Ubuntu as part of its certified stacks.

Oracle wouldn't need to pay billions for Red Hat, only to undermine the value of that deal by cutting the price of RHEL. Oracle could pay exactly $0.00 to establish a partnership with Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, and Ubuntu's already significant traction--both in personal computers and in servers--would do the rest.

If Oracle wants to beat Windows, it needs to get Windows-like distribution. Its applications help drive its databases, but if it wants a bottom-up distribution strategy to complement its sales force, it couldn't do better than Ubuntu, the leader in community Linux.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Walk the halls of any open-source conference and you'll see a large percentage of attendees with ironically un-open-source Apple laptops and iPhones. I've commented on the reasons for this before, but a new thought sprung to mind while reading Matthew Thomas' excellent (and old) "Why free software usability tends to suck."

Open-source advocates like good design as much as anyone, but the open-source development process is often not the best way to achieve it.

Thomas now works for Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, which arguably offers the industry's best Linux experience for personal computers. I got a sneak peek at a future Ubuntu release while at dinner with Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth Wednesday night, and it was gorgeous. Mac freak I may be, but the day Canonical releases that version of Ubuntu is the day my devotion to Apple will be severely tested.

Yes, it's that good.

But it's "that good" because there's a company behind it, a company dedicated to making Linux usable for average consumers. As Thomas writes,

Every contributor to the [open-source] project tries to take part in the interface design, regardless of how little they know about the subject. And once you have more than one designer, you get inconsistency, both in vision and in detail. The quality of an interface design is inversely proportional to the number of designers.

This, coupled with the fact that experienced interface designers tend to be rare in open-source projects and, even when present, "they are not heeded as much as they would be in professional projects precisely because they're dedicated designers and don't have patches to implement their suggestions," as Thomas writes, means that many open-source projects are technically brilliant...and abysmal to look at.

In the short term, proprietary products are generally going to win because they can more tightly control inputs and output and, intriguingly, it is likely that the most proprietary products will win. Why? Because in new markets, control is crucial to delivering a complete experience. Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and author, notes:

Companies must be integrated across whatever interface drives performance along the dimension that customers value. In an industry's early days, integration typically needs to occur across interfaces that drive raw performance--for example, design and assembly. Once a product's basic performance is more than good enough, competition forces firms to compete on convenience or customization. In these situations, specialist firms emerge and the necessary locus of integration typically shifts to the interface with the customer.

Hence, Apple reigns in smartphones because it's a comparatively new market and Apple can control the complete design of the product. Microsoft and Google, on the other hand, will struggle to compete because they are only delivering software, and depend heavily on the device manufacturer. (It's likely that Apple is also exercising significant influence over AT&T and the other wireless carriers, influence that Apple's competitors likely lack.)

Against this backdrop, I wouldn't expect open source to win in new markets unless a company or other committed organization (e.g., Mozilla with Firefox) is dedicated to making it succeed. But in the long run, it's fair to expect open systems to win. As Mozilla CEO John Lilly articulated to me in response to my post "Is Apple 'open enough' to rule the next decade of mobile?":

In the long term (10 years +), I think that open systems will almost always win, because the systems will be better understood from end to end, there will be more places for individual innovations to happen, more commoditization, and [more need for] the diversity and variety of an open ecosystem.

I agree. The key, however, is learning to tweak open systems in the short term to be competitive, too, and that, I believe, requires a "cathedral+bazaar" approach to open source. It's great, for example, that Red Hat has successfully helped to commoditize the Unix operating system market, but many of us don't want to have to sit around for decades waiting for an industry to tire out, thus ripening for open-source commoditization.

We want to innovate. We want to compete. And we want it now.

For that, you need a little more than open source, it seems, to make products usable. You need control, and control doesn't always jibe well with open-source development. This is one reason that we're seeing the emergence of the Open Core licensing model for open source.

It's why I think we need a lot more such activity if we want open source to dominate new markets, and not merely clean up the scraps of old markets.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Oracle has gone on a buying spree in the past few years, consolidating an impressive portfolio of market-leading technology. But there's one thing it still lacks, despite awkward efforts to fill the void: an operating system. Though Oracle has unsuccessfully courted Red Hat as an acquisition target for years, its affections might be better placed on Ubuntu.

Yes, by acquiring Sun, Oracle is gaining Solaris, but as Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst indicated in the Red Hat earnings call on Wednesday, the exodus of Solaris-to-Linux users continues apace, as Sun's attempt to neutralize Linux's appeal with OpenSolaris have had zero effect on stopping the exodus.

Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL), a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone, has failed to dent Red Hat's dominance, with Red Hat renewing all of its top 25 deals (again, and at 120 percent of renewal value) that were up for renewal, losing none to OEL. As such, RHEL's dominance remains a festering sore for Oracle's ambition to own a complete enterprise software stack. So long as Red Hat owns the foundation of that stack, it remains a real threat to Oracle.

So long as it's easier for Oracle's sales force to sell Oracle applications and databases on RHEL than on OEL, OEL will continue to bluster but fail.

Oracle could buy Red Hat, but with Red Hat earnings consistently strong, Red Hat is arguably too pricey to be a viable takeover target, as The Register opines. Besides, Red Hat has shown no desire to jump into the arms of its Redwood Shores business partner and competitor.

All of which makes me think that a strong partnership with Canonical for Ubuntu, rather than continuing to feed Red Hat, could be the right Linux strategy for Oracle.

Ubuntu is the clear community choice in Linux distributions, dominating Linux "desktop" adoption and also claiming a solid foothold on enterprise servers. Unlike OEL or Novell's Suse, Ubuntu comes with built-in enterprise momentum, albeit still at the grassroots level. Oracle's sales force could sell Ubuntu as a complement to Oracle technology, unlike OEL which is a difficult sales pitch.

The spirit to sell OEL is willing, but the flesh is weak.

As just one data point on this enterprise readiness to accept Ubuntu, my company, Alfresco, an open-source content management vendor, has seen adoption of Ubuntu rise to 37 percent of all trials of our Enterprise product, versus 28 percent for RHEL and Fedora.

A year ago, Ubuntu was making serious headway, but today the interest seems to be migrating to using Ubuntu for real enterprise deployments.

Other open-source companies I advise are seeing similar Ubuntu traction, a fact that is perhaps not lost on Dell and other hardware manufacturers that increasingly preload Ubuntu on their servers, Netbooks, and laptops.

Ubuntu, in short, has community momentum. What it lacks is the blessing of a major software vendor. Oracle, with its heft, is a kingmaker, and could give Ubuntu the "enterprise-ready" branding and certification that still elude it.

Not coincidentally, it was Oracle, more than any other company, that blessed Red Hat as the default enterprise Linux distribution years ago. But for Oracle's support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we'd almost certainly have a very different Linux market today, one where Novell's SUSE and other Linux distributions would have more respectable market shares compared to RHEL.

Oracle has the ability to make Ubuntu a mainstream enterprise server player. The question is whether it wants to.

As Matt Aslett, an analyst with The 451 Group, told me, "Oracle's Linux strategy is about serving its existing customers," and, given that there are more Oracle customers using RHEL than Ubuntu--coupled with the fact, as Sean Michael Kerner points out, that Oracle has yet to certify its products to run on Ubuntu--RHEL (and its clone OEL) may be seen as the safer course of action.

Even so, it remains unclear why Oracle should continue to plow resources into OEL when the market is voting for RHEL (paid enterprise adoption) and Ubuntu (unpaid community and paid OEM adoption). Either go back to a full embrace of RHEL or try Ubuntu.

Oracle could turn that Ubuntu popularity into paid deployments, while simultaneously asserting a greater measure of control over its operating system story. I'm a big fan of Red Hat's business, but I'm surprised Larry Machiavelli (er, Ellison) hasn't sought to check the ever-growing power of Red Hat in enterprise infrastructure.

What do you think? Would Ubuntu be a good move for Oracle, or is Linux such an afterthought for Oracle that the status quo with Red Hat is the right course of action?

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.