Among the company’s big-ticket purchases, Siebel Systems wasn’t enough. Nor was PeopleSoft/JD Edwards. Some said BEA Systems would be the end but then came Sun. And that list doesn’t even count some 30-odd smaller  “non-strategic” companies snapped up by the Big O. JBoss famously got away, instead acquired by Red Hat. But what’s to say Oracle won’t still end up with JBoss by virtue of buying all of Red Hat?

One long-time BEA partner said he more than half expects Oracle to make a Red Hat play, mainly because every time he tries to add a less pricey,  open-source, non-Oracle alternative to his portfolio–Glassfish, MySQL, Oracle ends up snarfing up its parent company and he’s back to square one.

You may laugh at the idea of an Oracle buyout of Red Hat, but as someone who scoffed at the notion of an Oracle-owned PeopleSoft, I’ll never underestimate that company again.