I was out talking with a friend of mine up here, doing a mental decompression, in Zola's (the local coffee shop, it's for sale if you want a rather bustling coffee shop in the 'Horse).

We rambled in random fashion when I mentioned the fact that Oracle is going to provide their own support for a Linux distribution.

Then I started going tangential - it was a good cup of hot chocolate - what if the end goal of supporting an OS is to provide a database appliance. Think of it, servers are becoming more and more of a commodity. The computer industry is all about providing services, less about providing software. Databases are more about software than service.
Now, imagine if you could buy a pre-built Oracle DB configuration. Tested, tuned, and ready for deployment on Oracle certified hardware. Heck, make it an online accessible service over encrypted channels and push the "online, reliable, available, secure, transaction services" of Oracle DB services - available in clustered, distributed, or in a "by the CPU minute fashion"! It can sell as an ASP or as hardware box in your data centre - it would be a license to print money from the name you trust in databases. Catchy, no?

That would be a slick. Databases can be huge, expensive and require significant expertise to realize their full efficiencies. This would just be the rational evolution of the commodization of this sector of the software industry.