Oracle, Microsoft and Linux

I was inclined to think Oracle’s support of RedHat linux was just Larry being bent out of shape about loosing Jboss. Comments from an aquaintance at Oracle didn’t do much to disprove that. They’re not likely to make any money off of this and providing better support than RedHat should be difficult. Putting out a distribution isn’t easy in the first place. Beyond that, replacing the distro’s packages with your “updated” packages is liable to wreak all sorts of problems, especially in the enterprise space where there are for instance closed source storage drivers built against very specific distro packages. Or where all the vendors certify their own support on various specific configurations that aren’t likely to include Oracle’s linux version(s). So neither the business or technical ends of this one have much up side.
And Novell in bed with Microsoft? On the surface partnering on selling licenses could be simply the logical conclusion to Microsoft approaching the linux community this past summer on better virtualisation interoperability.
What makes all of this wierd though is the indemnification, patent protection, cross licensing stuff. I am not a lawyer, but I’ve seen enough to understand that IP law and business is very complicated. Throw curve balls into the mix like the GNU General Public License and a huge number of copyright holders and it’s only going to be more complex. Not to mention the possibilities around GPL v.3.
There must be hoardes of lawyer people trying to sort all this out. Given the complexity it’s hard to see things resolving cleanly though. Complex problems, giant corporations and lawyers aren’t liable to lead pretty, clean solutions. Even if they’re smart lawyers like Eben Moglen.
Ugh.