Red Hat and Oracle have been co-operating to improve the desktop
version of Red Hat's Linux operating system.
The aim is to develop an enterprise-class environment that will run
Web-based versions of Oracle software applications, said Red Hat
chairman and chief executive officer Matthew Szulik, chairman and
chief executive officer at the Oracle World user show in San
Francisco.
"We're working with Oracle to expand and improve the client version
of Red Hat Linux, and we see the opportunity to have Oracle
applications running on Red Hat Linux," he explained.
The companies already have partnered closely on the server version
of Red Hat Linux, tuning it to run Oracle's database on clusters of
Intel-based servers.
Enterprise Manager, Oracle's suite of database management products,
and Oracle Collaboration Suite, its productivity applications
including e-mail and calendaring, are among the programs that will
take advantage of improvements to Red Hat's client operating
system, Szulik said.
Oracle may announce a browser-based version of Enterprise Manager
at its conference this week.
After failed attempts in the past, open-source software is poised
for widespread use on the desktop because programs like the Mozilla
Web browser, the KDE user interface and the Gnome desktop
environment have matured sufficiently, Szulik said.
Sun Microsystems, another Linux supporter, said recently that it
plans to sell desktop computers running Linux, Mozilla and other
open-source software.
The moves are seen as an attempt to unseat Microsoft's Windows
operating system from its dominant position on the desktop.
"For the past six or seven years people have been asking me about
the future of Linux on the client," Szulik said. "A couple of
things had to fall into place. We had to make sure we can make
money on the server side, we had to expand the competency [of
open-source products], and we had to create an alternative to
Internet Explorer. Mozilla had to improve."
When Oracle approached Red Hat some 18 months ago to discuss joint
development projects, Szulik said he was "suspicious" of the
company's motives. Since then, Oracle has "done all the things they
promised they would do", which include running many of its internal
applications on Red Hat Linux servers and releasing an open-source
version of its clustered file system.