Oracle Seeing Red Hat

Oracle(ORCL Quote) has been running roughshod over the enterprise-software world of late, winning gobs of market share by buying up the competition in an $18 billion acquisition spree.

Now it appears that the database giant is gearing up to make a run at a very different sort of enemy: Red Hat(RHAT Quote), the pre-eminent seller of Linux.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison kicked off speculation about his company's open source aspirations in a published interview in mid-April, in which he said Oracle could well build its own version of Linux. His words put the hurt on Red Hat's shares for a few days, but since then the stock has more than made up for the downturn, appreciating by 12%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped 1%.

Now there's talk on Wall Street that Oracle may use its annual analyst meeting in July to announce its debut as a Linux provider. Goldman Sachs analyst Rick Sherlund took the possibility seriously enough to publish a 36-page note on the subject this week and convene a conference call with investors and independent Linux experts to discuss the matter. ...