We’ve been saying here and elsewhere that the Microsoft-Novell and Oracle-Red Hat announcements have been market changing events. Some ripples are at the fore: Microsoft has siezed an opportunity to simultaneously head off Oracle and irritate Red Hat. Novell has turned its greatest weakness (the spectre of irrelevancy as recently as last week) into what could prove to be a great strength (It’s a little creepy in its Karl-Rove-esqueness, actually).

And Red Hat itself now faces the real possibility of extinction … Overnight, Red Hat has become the flattest piece of land between two battling superpowers: the Poland of software vendors.

Less obvious is the effect on Ubuntu’s plans to burst onto the enterprise scene in the West. Ubuntu’s sponsor, Canonical’s, overriding strategy hinges on two key pillars. First, Ubuntu is feature-rich and easy-to-use, to appeal to non-fuddy-duddys - that next generation of young …