There is a lot of talk around Oracle buying several Open Source companies. The latest being Novell. Two reasons are being provided for this. One, Oracle wants to own all the layers of the stack it provides to consumers. Once RedHat bought JBoss it became a new competitor by owning a similar stack. Meanwhile, IBM and MSFT are already strong competitors. Second, this is a pre-emptive strike. They feel that IBM or some other company will buy Novell.
My own opinion is that this is a bad idea. In theory, since Oracle’s products already work on top of Novell’s Linux distribution, ownership is not going to change anything. If they want to assure customers that their products would “work for sure” when purchased together, the existing alliances should suffice. What difference does ownership make if the APIs from Novell’s Linux distribution are open and standardized? In fact, by acquiring it Oracle may scare off other complementors that build on top of Novell’s OS. The whole point in the era of divided technical leadership is specialization and interoperability.