Enough already...

... with the crappy double entendres...

Understand your purpose

The slightly sneering tone of the initial sentence of the article, and some of the subsequent comments, misunderstand what IBM has done. That someone else can claim success with a business you've sold might be construed as proof of the validity of your decision, not evidence that you could have achieved the same thing. IBM is no Apple, and this is a high volume, low margin business that added little to the company's capabilities. Ultimately, it is a testament to IBM's understanding of its purpose as a company that it felt able to decide that this business was not part of its future.

Office 2007 files

I think it would be fair to point out that there's been a separate plugin that allowed versions of OpenOffice prior to 3.2 to open MS Office 2007 files. With 3.2 that support is improved and comes integrated out of the box.

It would also be reasonable to point out that Microsoft has made something of a dog's breakfast in supporting the new file formats on versions of Office for Mac....

Solaris is the key?

What scares Red Hat is not Unbreakable Linux, but Oracle buying Sun and Larry finally getting his own operating system. There are a lot of benefits to Red Hat that arise from Oracle's current commitment to Unbreakable Linux, not least from the enhanced support for the Red Hat strain of Linux and the explicit support for the assertion that Linux is a viable server platform for Oracle.

However, once Larry has Solaris he has an operating system with unique characteristics that he can choose to tune to provide features and performance unavailable on other platforms. OpenSolaris will continue, but Solaris 11 will likely be a tuned OS for Oracle, and to get it you will need an Oracle subscription. Suse Linux is simply a distraction.

License restrictions

The comments on installing RHEL without support are a little confused, as you buy a subscription that includes support and a license to use the binary distribution. Thus, it is not legal to download and install the RHEL binary without paying for the subscription/license.

You could, of course, download the source and build it yourself (or go to CentOS who do it for you) but I doubt that's what these RHEL users are doing.

Solaris Containers

You may have added to the confusing surrounding virtualisation. From the same document it points out that Solaris Containers are treated as hard partitions for the purposes of Oracle licensing.