Larry Ellison, chairman of Oracle, is a past master of spreading fear and uncertainty across the computing world. Last week, he was at it again in an interview with the Financial Times as he mused menacingly about the weakness of companies that distribute Linux, the open-source operating software.

Oracle had thought about buying companies such as Red Hat and Novell, he said, but concluded that it was not worth it. The trouble was that they owned no intellectual property and so anybody could take their main product – Linux – and produce a version of it themselves. In fact, Oracle might cease to endorse Red Hat’s version of Linux and distribute its own variant.