In a move that will irritate Red Hat no end, Oracle Thursday extended the mantle of Unbreakable Linux to United Linux, the SuSE-led consortium composed of the four Red Hat wannabes, Conectiva, Turbolinux, SuSE itself of course and the new industry pariah, the SCO Group, whose participation in United Linux would be dangling by a thread right now if they could figure out how to cashier it for suing IBM.

SuSE CEO Richard Siebt, who is distancing himself all he can from SCO by publicly and repeatedly disapproving of its course of action, claims to be unconcerned by SCO?s contention that IBM ripped off its IP and put it in Linux and says the United Linux code won't be reviewed for improprieties because the rules have been followed since the beginning, a point that someday may need to be proved.

Anyway, this Unbreakable Linux business, a distinction Red Hat has had to itself for the last nine months or so, basically means that Oracle will provide tier 1, 2 and 3 support for United Linux customers running its stuff, in other words, creating a single point of contact for both the OS and the database.

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