Oracle’s announcement Wednesday that they are getting into the Linux business doesn’t impress me much. While Red Hat’s stock tanked on the news, the only people selling are those that don’t understand the Linux market. Red Hat has been involved with Linux from the very start. It has at least a decade’s head start on Oracle, something Oracle will have a tough time overcoming, no matter how much money they burn trying.

Sure, Oracle has enormous resources that Red Hat and others vendors like Novell don’t. The open source community, however, values things differently. A brand name or the size of the company may impress the so-called market analysts and the press, but it doesn’t impress the typical open source user. What impresses open source users is geek credibility. Compared to Red Hat, Oracle is a n00b. Red Hat is the Long-Haired Hacker. Oracle is The Suit.

Huge differences exist in the corporate philosophies of the two companies. Red Hat, for instance, releases most or all of its products as open source. Oracle, on the other hand, embraces the proprietary model. Open source does not come naturally to Oracle. In fact, I forsee Oracle having a tough time adapting to these new business rules.

This announcement sounds to me like it was done as revenge, perhaps for a spurned deal or takeover offer, or some kind of spat with Red Hat support. I don’t see Oracle as really being serious about Linux. Expect to see Oracle make a few halfhearted efforts at this before going shopping for an established Linux vendor to buy.

I’ve blogged before about replacing my expensive SprintPCS plan with something more reasonable. It looks like I’ve found “reasonable.” The company is called Net10 and the plan is pretty unique. Net10 is a prepaid service, an MVNO that uses T-Mobile and Cingular‘s GSM network. The service costs 10 cents a minute, period: no daily charges, no other fees other than the usual taxes. Plus, minutes don’t have to expire in 30 or 60 days. You can buy minutes which don’t expire for a whole year, making service cost as low as $12.50 a month.

I did an analysis of my calling habits and figured out I could save money with pay-for-use. We’ll see. I ordered a reconditioned Motorola phone for $40 which should get here any day now. With it comes 300 free minutes (that alone’s worth 30 bucks). Thus, it’s an amazing value.

Oh, and my favorite thing about Net10? No contract! If I don’t like them I’m not on the hook (no pun intended).

I’m going to use both services side by side for a while to evaluate them. I’ll let y’all know how it works.