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Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told the FT that the company had considered buying Novell which now owns SUSE Linux but is now debating whether to launch its own version of the open source operating system.

'I'd like to have a complete stack,' Ellison said. 'We're missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a

The pressure on Oracle to come up with its own version of Linux will have increased following the news that Red Hat has bought JBoss for around $420 million if performance targets are hit. JBoss is a specialist in open source middleware applications for businesses and operates in the same sector as Oracle in delivering corporate solutions. As a result, Red Hat, the only other major supplier of Linux to the corporate community, is now in competition with Oracle - a situation Ellison is clearly uncomfortable with.

He told the FT 'We have to re-look at the relationship; so does IBM'. Both companies have embraced the open source path in the past few years, not only as a way of providing a counter weight to Microsoft's dominance in the operating systems market but also as a way of developing their own services and solutions businesses.