Correct, Oracle would be in a position to do exactly that. Whether they do or not is another story but thats a pretty big liability.
Given they are discontinuing Solaris and all-in on Red Hat Enterprise Linux I can't help but wonder why they don't do more with ZFS on Linux and therefor wonder if the NetApp patent suits or some other patent suit is preventing them from doing anything in the background.
Many people don't realise that these crappy patent suits in the background prevent all sorts of really basic stuff, like the fact most things now bounce through a cloud server (like Facetime) because there's a patent troll for peer-to-peer communications. And it's causing total waste as a result :( It also seems likely that prevented facetime becoming an open standard as Apple original promised. This is only 1 example though.
This may be true, but when Oracle killed OpenSolaris, my non-Sun/Oracle friends wrote off Solaris and moved off it.
Killing OpenSolaris, and talking up SPARC so much, made people think that a) Larry just wants to vendor lock them, b) doesn't care about x86 support because it makes vendor lock-in harder for Oracle, c) the OpenSolaris derivative community will not be able to compete with Linux. So everyone has grudgingly accepted that Linux is it for the enterprise Unix market.
I hate this as much as you do. I <3 Solaris/Illumos. Illumos derivatives have their niches, no doubt, and I want to be able to use them much more. But that's not how business people think.
I'm not sure that Oracle could turn this impression around at this point. To begin with it would have to restart OpenSolaris, and that might not be enough. OpenSolaris greatly helped Sun overcome resistance to Solaris, but it only went so far, so Oracle will have to do even more work to make Solaris' future bright.
Given they are discontinuing Solaris and all-in on Red Hat Enterprise Linux I can't help but wonder why they don't do more with ZFS on Linux and therefor wonder if the NetApp patent suits or some other patent suit is preventing them from doing anything in the background.
Many people don't realise that these crappy patent suits in the background prevent all sorts of really basic stuff, like the fact most things now bounce through a cloud server (like Facetime) because there's a patent troll for peer-to-peer communications. And it's causing total waste as a result :( It also seems likely that prevented facetime becoming an open standard as Apple original promised. This is only 1 example though.