Are Platform Vendors Stealing Linux? - ITworld.com

Something rather interesting is going on in the Linux enterprise space, something which I think enterprise Linux vendors (and the rest of us) need to pay attention.

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It started with a rather quiet announcement on September 14, when Amazon--you know, the book-and-cloud vendor--announced the Amazon Linux AMI for their Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) service. An AMI, for those not familiar with the term, is how Amazon Web Services refers to a virtual machine on its EC2 network. This new Amazon Linux AMI, then, essentially represents a new Linux distro for the enterprise, albeit one that runs on EC2 only. But then Oracle came out with its wacky announcement on Monday of this week: it was releasing a new, optimized-for-Oracle-hardware-and-software Linux kernel to go along with its rebranded Oracle Linux offering. I have already called this as a blatant attempt to sell Oracle boxes and software, but I got to thinking about these two seemingly unrelated announcements and I came up with a disturbing question.

Are Platform Vendors Stealing Linux? - ITworld.com