During the company's earning call last month Oracle CEO Larry Ellison uttered the first words out of the company about its hijacking Red Hat Linux since it opened its front against Red Hat at the end of October.

Despite recent press speculation that it's all been a great flop, Ellison claimed that Oracle's Linux support push is off to a "strong beginning." He said it's replaced Red Hat support at Yahoo (a statement that might not be true), that it's signed some "half-a-million-dollar" enterprise deals and that it's got Dell, HP and the Fortune 500 reseller CDW reselling its ostensibly "cheaper than Red Hat" support.

Ellison basically sounded like he refuses to lose. "This is just the beginning," he said, "We're not going to build it overnight, but we will build it."

Meanwhile, according to Pacific Crest analyst Brendan Barnicle, who's been informally counting noses, 23% of operating systems buyers are using Oracle Linux to Red Hat's 70%; 15% of Red Hat users are thinking of switching to Oracle, down from 33% in November; 17% might switch from HP, 12% from IBM; 35% were using Novell, down from 42% in November; and 33.5% is the discount they're looking for. He could only find two accounts that switched, one from HP, the other from Red Hat. However, the channel reports other wins and business going to Novell because of Microsoft.

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