Three large vendors recently made announcements which boost support for open source software. Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) announced that it will begin providing support for the Linux OS for less money than RedHat (NASDAQ:RHAT). Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:SUNW) announced that it is releasing several implementations of Java, including Java SE and Java ME under the GPL license. Finally, IBM (NYSE:IBM) announced that it will be shipping PAVE, a project to run x86 Linux software on its Power RISC based systems. All three announcements provide a boost to the adoption of Linux and open source more generally in the enterprise. The announced partnership between Microsoft and Novell is indirectly related and will be discussed in forthcoming research.

Oracle’s decision to provide support for Linux puts competitive pressure on RedHat but also gives Oracle a better avenue to compete against MySQL and the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl) application stack. Oracle can now provide a complete package with Oracle database replacing MySQL and with full support for the Linux OS. RedHat will likely have to adjust its support prices, but still remains the company with the most expertise in Linux and therefore is not threatened by this move.

IBM’s Power Advanced Virtualization Emulator will open up it’s p-series Power servers to run Linux for x86 in an emulated layer. While PAVE introduces a small overhead in performance, it allows migration of x86 to more powerful servers based on the RISC processor, thereby providing flexibility in deployment options for enterprises with existing p-series servers.