Larry Ellison (2006): If an open source product gets good enough, we'll take it
us.ft.com
us.ft.com
Agreed, but with Oracle it's more like bundling free code with very expensive not free code and then supporting the whole package. Case in point about what he mentioned regarding Apache.
Sure but that's called a 'solution' (sorry for the enterprise corp dev speak). Most FOSS projects don't solve a customer's problem in their own right and larger customers want to buy into solutions not disparate projects that they then have to put together and maintain.
These customers don't see it as X amount of free code and Y amount of 'very expensive not free code'. They just see the sum of X+Y and a price point.
To use a completely left-field expression for this context: don't hate the player, hate the game.
I'm not a fan of Oracle but the title given here on HN is kinda deceptive.
So... if I recall correctly, that is how a company is SUPPOSED to make money from open source, by offering support. He did say 'exploit', which is more accurate, but seriously, it's not necessarily in a bad way. He didn't say they were going to 'embrace and extinguish' it, for instance, and that doesn't appear to be their aim.
That said, I'm pretty wary of their actions regarding Java.
Doesn't that just piss you off?
This is not what RMS and the "Free Software" advocates say about making money from free software.
What this guy is saying is, we'll take open source and embed it in our proprietary products and we don't owe anyone anything.
Bollocks!
Invert the question: for every dollar of "profit" diverted to Ellison, imagine the lost opportunity cost to the rest of us—what else could those billions of dollars have been spent on other than a shitty, obscenely overpriced database that belongs back in 1983 and that is entrenched into the biggest Gordian-knot of enterprise vendor-lock-in? A helluva a lot more good could have been done in the world if Ellison was a pauper. He might have even been a good man before he had all that money, though I doubt it.
My only question is: how best can the open-source community align itself to cut off Oracle's air supply?
Now that Google is unabashedly marching under the evil flag of Mordor, can't they just open up Big Table or something for enterprise customers, and snatch the pebble from Ellison's hand? Since day one, Google's dominant strategy has always been to take an expensive, over-engineered technology that other megacorps sell, scale it off the charts of those selling it, and then give it away, recouping the difference by becoming the quasi-impartial steward of the Internet.
I don't think NoSQL yet has the traction to put two bullets in the back of Oracle's skull and call it suicide, though as we saw with the success(and then failure) of MySQL, the situation can change in as little as a few years.
Where's the harm in that?
IMHO Ellison's lack of distinction between "take" & "use" is precisely the harm. The danger is how easily that becomes the Embrace & Extinguish strategy. He obviously sees no such distinction himself and imagines that he's big and powerful enough to just take whatever he wants. He sounds like a modern day warlord, and not in the good way. In my book, any individual who assumes that much power, without giving back in proportion, deserves to be shut down on general principle. How is it possible to respect one of the most eminent business leaders on Earth when he shoots his dumb mouth off in public like that? At best he reveals his inability to strategize & maintain coalitions, and at worst he reveals his sociopathic hubris. Being so mighty he would do well to learn the value of at least trying to listen to the advice of his PR viziers, and wear a false-face of humility in public, so as to not trigger indefensible public outrage. Which would lead to eventual Federal investigations—anyone as big as Oracle has a graveyard of skeletons buried in the basement.
I can forgive accidents, stupidity, and even short-term, limited corporate greed(implicit in The Game); but never when it's backed by the treacherous potential to cause long-term harm to much weaker open source allies. Linux, Java, Apache and other open source software projects are not mere pawns to be moved around the chess board upon which Oracle, Apple, Google and IBM engage in battle.
I hope the hippie idealism of open source populism hasn't been drowned in the ocean of money, but is instead still alive & kicking—Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Against_the_Wall_Motherfucke...
I think that PostgreSQL (RedHat database etc.) can serve most (but not all) of the applications Oracle DB serves.
There is an application server business (BEA), hardware business (Sun) and applications (PeopleSoft, Siebel).
Do you perhaps mean:
'Just like we did to Sun with Linux.'
As Windows was just fine. Linux on the desktop never happened.
Alternatively:
'Just like we're doing to Ballmer with KHTML and Firefox.'
No. If an open source product gets good enough, we'll simply take it. Take [the web server software] Apache: once Apache got better than our own web server, we threw it away and took Apache. So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it – a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that's what we'll do. So it is not disruptive at all – you have to find places to add value. Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane. Keep in mind it's not that good in most places yet. We're a big supporter of Linux. At some point we may embed Linux in all of our products and provide support.
By most accounts, it's an unmitigated disaster. I think they sold like the first reference sales and then trickled to almost nothing. They still use the term "unbreakable Linux" but there is no OS product marketed around it anymore.
Sometimes people don't like the cheaper knockoffs.
I think the customers that bought up Oracle Linux were the kind of dumb sheep customers who'll buy anything a vendor pushes them (yes, there are many of those out there).
Informed customers not happy with RHEL licensing and support simply swap out to CentOS.
It's an interesting examination of customer behavior in fact.
You have no idea what a relief it is when your DB vendor can't blame the OS for bugs and performance problems, and actually have to solve them.
Thats why we love it when Oracle does storage, network and hardware (i.e. Exadata) - we love having one throat to choke.
I'll grant that Oracle can support Oracle running on Red Hat better, but that's a different story.