Some time ago Oracle made a splash announcement about going into the Linux OS Vendor space to ship their own operating system, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux ripoff. At the time (the day of Oracle's press release) I wrote in my blog how Oracle's initiative lacked imagination, originality and would ultimately fizzle out, because other than getting "inspired" by Red Hat's work, Oracle did not provide any infrastructure, any new or better tools and did not bring any innovation to the market. Oracle's announcement totally lacked any sort of value besides the metoo factor.

Today (after reading this), I can take what I said back then and /bin/sed -e 's/Red Hat/rPath/' -e 's/Oracle/Red Hat/'. Everything else stays the same.

Clearly Red Hat decided they like rPath's business model, but they haven't really thought through what it takes to enable ISVs' to build appliances yet. But, why wait for a product before you do the press release? That takes too long. On the positive side, it seems Red Hat has learned Oracle's tactics well, although they're disregarding Oracle's results when using those tactics. Look no further back than to Unbreakable Linux.