Oracle’s outspoken chief executive officer believes the company needs its own operating system to match the competition, and has admitted he considered buying Suse Linux owner, Novell. In an interview with the Financial Times, Larry Ellison said that Oracle needs to own an operating system in order to fully compete with rivals Microsoft and IBM. Ellison admitted that the company has looked into acquiring Novell, which owns Suse Linux — the second most popular Linux distribution after Red Hat. However, he did not reveal any details about a potential agreement.

In February, Oracle tried but failed to acquire open-source database maker MySQL.