That is underestimating the so-called old guards alliance. There old school IT providers are quite conscious about their imminent irrelevance giving the trend in society and tech. They know very well who are their common enemy.
IBM has a lot of money, Oracle has a lot of money. If IBM took a large chunk of Oracle's money, they could survive for decades more without selling anything.
I meant to say that IBM likely doesn't have any deterrents to sue Oracle as they are no longer on the same page with regards to their business markets.
Is it taking it out of context when you only provide the context after the fact?
That being said Oracle and IBM still compete in many markets such as cloud computing and software platforms. Since Red Hat became part of IBM the areas where they compete has increased lately.
But the information that IBM and Oracle are still competitors in many markets is explicitly what I was unsure about. Thanks for reminding me about the Red Hat acquisition, I completely forgot about that already.