Red Hat in 2006 acquired JBoss, whose open-source Java server software competes directly with Oracle software. For its part, Oracle's Unbreakable linux program turned Oracle into a direct Red Hat competitor. Oracle didn't just sell a version of linux, it cloned Red Hat's from the source code in an attempt to reproduce its software and hardware compatibility.
The competition hasn't died down. This month, Red Hat announced its Red Hat Exchange, a mechanism to sell software from open-source allies, several of them Oracle competitors.
