Yeah, I guess the connection isn't obvious. Bill had decided to start competing in the SQL space. He announced a bunch of features that matched Oracle's enterpr

Yeah, I guess the connection isn't obvious. Bill had decided to start competing in the SQL space. He announced a bunch of features that matched Oracle's enterprise features 1:1 and promised to make SQLServer scalable and supported by a big consulting force. So Larry met with Scott/HP/IBM and to move forward with a "low cost linux appliance" with software to compete in the various segments of the PC space - they would almost give the whole thing away for free. Larry met with Bill with a list of demands in exchange for killing the project. It took a series of several meetings. I don't know the specifics asked by IBM/HP/Sun, since I only heard the Oracle side of the story. I believe we had, at one point, 200 engineers from those companies there at Oracle HQ making Linux work. I know that we flew in Linus to explain to him some of the changes (since they were enterprise kernel features that he had no background with) - and he green-lighted the changes (they really just matched what was already in the UNIX kernels from HP/IBM and others.)