It seemed that every news outlet I went to early last week was jumping all over a story in Monday's edition of London's Financial Times that was based on an interview with Ellison. "Oracle Chief Opens Door to Buying Novell," trumpeted the headline of a Boston Globe article that cited the Financial Times story. "Oracle Looks at Buying Novell," a Slashdot headline proclaimed. "Oracle Contemplates Acquiring Novell," Softpedia echoed.

Having interviewed Ellison myself several times over the years, I didn't find it a bit surprising that he would say something like that just to bask in the buzz it would create. But then I read the original Financial Times article, and I realized it wasn't Ellison being Ellison after all. It was we in the media who were the jerks.

Buried way down in the 1,410-word story was a reference to Oracle's widely reported interest in buying JBoss, which was recently acquired by Red Hat. Ellison noted that there would have been a risk in Oracle acquiring JBoss or Red Hat because of the inherent lack of control that open-source companies have over their intellectual property. In that context, the Financial Times author wrote, "Oracle looked at buying Novell, owner of SUSE, Europe's biggest Linux company, but would have faced the same risk, [Ellison] adds."

That's it. That's what all the fuss was about. A condensed version of the article by the same author made an equally innocuous reference to Novell: "As part of a recent study of the open-source software market, Mr. Ellison said that Oracle had considered buying Novell, which after Red Hat is the biggest distributor of Linux."

It's mind-boggling that those statements would come as a surprise to anyone. Companies like Oracle consider such acquisitions all the time. I would be absolutely shocked if anyone at Oracle, IBM, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, CA or even Microsoft could honestly and knowledgeably say that their company hadn't considered an acquisition of Novell.