However, Oracle did exactly that with PeopleSoft, by announcing a hostile takeover a price significantly below the going price at the time, and saying if they suceeded they would discontinue PeopleSoft's products.
I still don't know how Larry pulled that one off.
It hasn't "continued" its plunge if it has recovered since yesterday. The title is misleading.
Actually most of the linux crowd didn't expect this, linux hacker N3WBI3 created a thread on FR just a week or so ago entitled There is no Oracle Linux. Ellison however had already made it clear months ago that his intent was to make a free and apparently legal copy of Red Hat instead of wasting his money buying some other less popular offshoot.
Looks to me like Oracle is trying to drive the stock price down greatly, then simply buy Red Hat on the cheap.
Possible, if Red Hat's customers all abandon it for this and other various reasons, which probably won't actually happen, as the internet is alive with Red Hat defenders this week, chastising Oracle for simply doing what the GPL license they so lovingly support is designed to do - allow someone else to ripoff your intellectual property and drive the cost to acquire it further down to zero.
Ellison's comments are pretty much spot on, Linux has recently stagnated, and he's fully allowed by the community worshiped GPL license to make free copies of competitors products, so he's going to try to revive it again, what he didn't admit to are his obvious aspirations to take on Microsoft with a complete top to bottom software stack which hasn't so far worked for anyone. And while his company does bring a huge presence and capability into the operating system market, the GPL landscape will remain a full of landmines that have already damaged peripheral contributors like IBM, who to their credit were wise enough to pass on this opportunity and left it to someone else to risk.
End result is someone else will now try to make a living on free software, but probably won't have too good a go since the landscape is already extremely fractured, and littered with those that tried and then suffered immensely for it, Red Hat itself now being a victim, although possibly not fatally, they'll probably just start limping around severly like the other linux companies on the constant verge of bankruptcy, like Novell, Linspire, Xandros, Mandrake, etc.
Red Hat is a high beta stock, they always have been, the have been as high as 150$ a share and as low as 3$ a share in the past seven years. In the past..
And Red Hat recently purchased JBoss, I wonder will happen there.