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Already knew about it. And if it were something on which they could base the future of the company, would they have just paid a major chunk of their cash to buy Sun? Probably not. Buying Sun comes with problems — I’m sure that if Linux were ready for prime time, or even reasonably close to ready, they would have let IBM take Sun. Oracle probably doesn’t want to be in the server business. Java is nice, but they could have licensed it. OpenOffice and MySQL - feh. Nice bragging rights, but they probably won’t add much to the bottom line. Sun’s documents/filings indicate that there were two other bidders besides Oracle - and one of them almost certainly was IBM, who is now rumored to be sniffing at RedHat.

For the money they just spent on Sun, they could have hired a whole lot more Linux people than they already have slinging code, paying them hefty salaries to make Linux do anything they wanted, right? They didn’t do that. Instead, they buy up Sun and then they reach out and snatch up Virtual Iron a couple weeks later. It is pretty clear that they want to go head to head against IBM’s z/OS and DB2 offerings - and to get there, they’ll need to either pour a lot of effort into Linux or port over features from Solaris, a combination of the two, etc.

Linux isn’t “unsuitable” for DBMS work. It just ain’t about to compete against z/OS at the high end - yet. Even Solaris is a stretch - z/OS has plenty of features that Solaris still has only on the drawing board. Mainframe-class rollouts are the highest margin accounts Oracle has, and Linux simply doesn’t have the features that z/OS does. Solaris has some of the features, so you could say that Solaris is closer to a head:head match against IBM at the high end, but even it still has a ways to go in features.

BTW — you can run Linux on z/VM and on z9 or z10’s, so Linux is available on IBM’s mainframes. It isn’t the preferred deployment OS for DB2, but it is there for those who want to go that route.