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The Open Sourcing of Oracle
Thanks to Simone for pointing out this article by Andy Duncan regarding Oracle and its relationship to Open Source. The article starts out with background, and the metaphor to the Italian Renaissance is a bit odd, but I do think that this is a path Oracle is looking to walk down - what do you all think?
At the small silicon valley company where I work, which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, we (well, the bigwigs, of course, I'm not this brain-damaged) have decided to base our offerings at least initially on oracle rather than one of the myriad Free and non-Free alternatives simply because the thinking is that customers would think it odd if we used anything else. Never mind that other databases cost less and perform better, and the the database is in our case invisible to the customer. It's just that silly. I shit you not.
Pardon me for spoiling your FUD, but:
Maybe you should try using these databases before discounting them. Just because MySQL does not have transactions or row-level locking does not mean other 'free' RDBMS do not. As far as your claim that 'you tried'. What, exactly, did you try? Maybe the 'experts' you hired were stupid or incompetent. Maybe your architecture is inefficient. Maybe a hundred other things caused these problems and you incorrectly thought it was the fault of the database.
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I should hope not. Pedophilia is absolutely loathsome, and...
Oh wait. You forgot a comma.
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And please don't bring up MySQL or postgreSQL (you haven't so far, and I am grateful). If you want cheap web transactions fine, but I am talking about true DB apps where you need row-level locking, rollback, transactions, etc.. all the things That the above mentioned RDBMS's have. I use MSSQL behind a server that gets about half a million hits a day, and it is fine. Granted the machines are dual proc powerhouses, but it runs great. I have Oracle at my clients who have several thousand employees accessing financials. Nothing else could be as solid and run this.
I say this because we
Anyway, you know what I'm sayin. Right tool for the right job in the end.
Where is the benefit for oracle to OSS? It uses free tools to draw in casual developers, who then become Oracle DBA's. But why would they throw away years of engineering just to give it all away? That's ridiculous. Oracleis one of the most profitable companies in the world. That won't change. Just because a bunch of teenagers don't think it is worth the money, doesn't mean that the people with the money to spend on it agree. There is a reason Oracle can charge per/cpu licensing. It ain't because it sucks kids.
But databases are NOT the point. Oracle is offering complete solutions. Its not just the database, its complete application server, soon also development environment, its CRM and ERP and everything tightly integrated and cooperating. As far as I would like to, I don't see open source products even started on this line.
For some parts of what Oracle offers you have open source alternatives, though still few years behind in the development, but there are whole parts of Oracle solutions where there are no alternatives in Open source whatsoever.
And I will tell you when will be the right time for Oracle to start to worry about opensourcing its database. At the point when first bank of the world top10 will adopt ANY open source database. Not sooner, but not even later.
Of course any opinions expressed here are just mine and mostly likely different from these of Larry Ellison or anyone else in the company :)
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
I think this is known as a strategic partnership. It is in Oracle's interest to run it's software on a large number of platforms, and also to run on free operating systems. That way, corps can cut some costs on paying for Oracle and solaris/windows. More money goes to Oracle, or a larger percentage of the price of deployment. In effect, the database layer becomes the important platform, not the OS.
However, i'm sure they want to keep charging a premium for their proprietary database and app server software, as long as they can.
Plus, it's a bonus for Ellison to stick it to Gates. It makes sense though, as long as Oracle stays significantly better than the open source alternatives.
FIRST POST!!!1!!
Okay, now that I got that out of the way (and I probably won't be when I actually get this posted...)
I think Oracle probably holds the same place in the database world as Sun does in the server world. Open Source is a great thing, but it hasn't quite evolved to the enterprise-level capability that's needed. If I was doing anything involving heavy processing, you'd better believe I'd be running a Linux (or BSD or Darwin) farm to do the work. But if I needed something that was going to handle anything and everything I could throw at it, Solaris would still be my first choice (and you can get source anyway, even if the licensing is ludicrous).
Oracle's future is in positioning themselves as the Solaris of databases; when MySQL and PostgreSQL finally do catch up, they should be preparing themselves to go down the same route as IBM, opening up to the Open Source community while providing a rock-solid support network for their users. If Larry Ellison wants to prove to the world that he's not quite as much of a nutjob as everyone thinks he is, this is the sort of idea that should be on his roadmap.
/Brian
Oracle has too many advantages over its competitors to open the source code. If Andy Duncan thinks that MySQL is going to be competitive in a few years, he is smoking some good stuff. Does anyone really thing that one day MySQL is going to support parallel servers on a multi-domain Sun E10k? This guy's only crediability is that he was a contract DBA at Oracle's EMEA data center - he sure is in the know. :)
This is a nice illustration of what I find so unappealing about the "Free everything!" crowd. There is an utter contempt for the skill, talent, labor and risk that go into creating the goods they want to redistribute. In this case, it's the idea that creating software is simply "blasting bits" onto media. In other contexts, it's a similar attitude towards the creation of music, pharmaceuticals, inventions, brand names, literature... The only professions worthy of respect are sysadmin, Linux advocate or seller of T-shirts and stuffed monkeys. I'm no Libertarian but people like this make me want to beat them over the head with a copy of Atlas Shrugged.
In an entirely unrelated point, notice that the same guy then sings the praises of Oracle for involving itself with free software, while they keep their DB entirely proprietary and shackled with the sort of licensing MS would be roundly denounced for.
Oracle has the same privilige games have on the desktop; they're cut total immunity from Open Source advocacy, probably because they're simply too important to the advocates to forgo. In fact, both Taco and Hemos seem to believe that as long as their their Windows partitions are only used for games, they don't really exist the rest of the time.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
This is particularly likely if they decide to re-engineer the product's kernel to be more object-oriented. Oracle's attempts at adding object features to its database started at 7.3 with user defined data types, got a huge boost at version 8.0 with user-defined object types, and another kick forward in 8i (8.1) with the internal Java engine. But it's all just grafted onto a relational kernel that hasn't changed significantly since version 7. (The rumor is that Oracle's developers are afraid to touch it for fear of breaking something, so all new features are bolted on using PL/SQL packages.)
So, let's say they rewrite the kernel from the ground up and give it a new name. It becomes the flagship product, and that clears the way for Oracle to release the older source code to whomever wants it. They'd be making most of their money on subscriptions to their online apps anyway.
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