Oracle's Infrastructure Now Fully Linux-ized

mbadolato writes "An article over at InformationWeek reports Oracle is aggressively adopting Linux both internally and for its products, despite SCO Group's threats earlier this week that it may sue those who don't pay licensing fees to the company. Chuck Rozwat, an Oracle executive VP, says the company has moved its IT infrastructure to Linux, a year after CEO Larry Ellis issued the mandate. In the coming year, Oracle will move its base development platform to Linux, including putting the open-source operating system on the workstations of 8,000 developers"

Comments

SCO is no real threat

[The No Vlad Zone]

This move should prove to everyone that SCO's claims are complete BS. If a company with the resources like Oracle isn't bothered by their threats then we can assume that their lawyers told them that SCO's claims are baseless. Oracle's products are the mainstay of the database industry and moving to Linux shows that Microsoft does not in fact have a monopoly. If more Linux desktops are deployed Microsoft will become just another software company competing with all the others.

Re:SCO is no real threat

[buffer-overflowed]

Maybe they're taking a calculated risk. They could strongly suspect the claims are baseless, and even if they aren't it's not going to be resolved for a good 2-5 years.

When it is resolved, if SCO does win(and survives bleeding cash from legal fees), the infringing code will be removed and they're fine anyway. If the infringing code can't be removed [unlikely], then they're banking on Linux being a serious competitor around then anyway and worth the liscensing fees circa 2007.

I'd say it's a pretty safe bet.

What'd they have before?

[groove10]

The article doesn't say what they were runnign before this switch. My hunch is that it was Solaris.

I get the feeling that most large desktop migrations happen from commercial UNIX to linux rather than from Windows to linux. That transition would seem much more difficult and costly.

Also are they using a distribution or are they "rolling their own"?

Re:What'd they have before?

[n3rd]

I get the feeling that most large desktop migrations happen from commercial UNIX to linux rather than from Windows to linux.

Actually Ellison (like McNealy) is a well know Microsoft hater. Althought Linux is one of the best developement environments available I wouldn't be suprised if the decision to swith to Linux was partially out of spite for Microsoft.

Re:What'd they have before?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm posting anonymously because I work for the company in question.

The major platform for development was Solaris (and still is at the current time for me and my group). There have been various projects ongoing for awhile now to migrate the development to be Linux based.
And to address the specific question about migrating from Solaris to Linux (not from Windows), there was a plan being deployed in various groups to change the development environment before the Linux plan. The earlier one was to move to small cheap Windows workstations as 'thin' (ha!) clients to rack Solaris machines.

So, the Linux-based plan still shows a large loss of potential Windows licenses (for all the MS-bashers out there).

Oracle in Austin, TX

[Yiliar]

I went for an interview at Oracle in Austin. Being a SUNOS/Solaris person for over 15 years, it was an eye opener to see the Austin facility was nearly 100% Linux.

When I suggested at the beginning of the interview that a person would have to be crazy to want to administer 8,000 diskless Linux servers tied to NetApps storage, the interview prompty ended. :)

My conclusion, however, was that Oracle is indeed committed to Linux. In fact they are betting the company on it.

QANTAS, Linux, Sun, Oracle and MS

[thelandp]

I work at QANTAS (Australia's largest Airline), and we're using Oracle alot, but not using Linux anywhere - we are basically a Solaris shop. The next major changes to our software infrastructure involve commiting more fully to Oracle. That may involve switching to Linux for servers, but probably not for desktops - they will stay as Win NT 4.0.

Now, I think Linux is technically great, and I hate the business practices of Microsoft. However, experience at QANTAS says that for us, Linux is not really any threat to Microsoft, it is much more dangerous to Sun. If we switch over to Linux here, we'll be doing Sun out of business, and Microsoft is unscathed. How is that good for the world?

Adoption of Linux on the desktop is a much bigger threat to Microsoft, and much harder to achieve because of inertia.