Oracle CEO gets strategic with Red Hat name calling
Red Hat chief executive Matthew Szulik has written an open letter to Larry Ellison, essentially accusing Oracle of being a relic of a dying enterprise software age, which has served its own interests rather than those of customers for 30 years.
Szulik's mildly worded letter appeared in the Financial Times on Thursday, shanghaiing the very pink pages Ellison had co-opted just five days earlier to share with the world his thoughts on how Oracle may buy a Linux distro. Szulik has been joined by Scott Handy, IBM's vice president of Linux and open source, who made it clear IBM ain't gonna be re-assessing its relationships with anyone just cos' Red Hat bought JBoss. Ellison used his FT piece to lump IBM in with Oracle, saying both must re-assess their relationships with Red Hat since it bought their mutual competitor, JBoss.
The slowly gathering backlash against Larry's comments are almost as predictable as Ellison's words themselves. Larry's outburst blends some good-old-fashioned ERP/CRM vendor politics calculated to freeze the competition with the passions of the jilted lover who knows he's lost something of great value.
