Which Linux would Oracle buy?

Is Oracle serious about entering the Linux market? Well, if so, then the best thing that CEO Larry Ellison could do is buy an existing distribution, rather than mess around trying to create Oracle’s own one. But what distribution to buy? One possibility is to buy Red Hat, who recently bought middleware outfit JBoss. But, as Stan Beer of itwire.com writes, Red Hat has still not delivered a viable desktop product, and would be pretty expensive at around $5 billion. Novell, on the other hand, has the closest thing on the market to a saleable Linux desktop with Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop, and would be a good bit cheaper at around $3 billion.

All of this is speculation, of course. Oracle remains tight lipped about any possible merger, or where all of this Oracle Linux stuff is going. But make no mistake – Linux is important to Oracle (all of its development has been taking place on Linux for some time) so Oracle and Linux will be interlinked in some way sometime soon.