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

Ellis?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when did Larry Ellison drop the last two letters of his last name? Come on, editors...

Re:Ellis?

[The Old Burke]

I don't know about why the n is missing, but SCO has the exclusive right to use the o in their name.

Nice

[TheQuantumShift]

A big giant company, openly using linux even with sco's perfectly logical (from a corporate america standpoint) litigation. A big giant company that other big giant companies buy from. This is what I like to see. And by the time I finish this post it will nolonger be first. I'll be lucky to break the top 50 by the end of this sentence...

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

[Feyr]

actually no, read the article it says "..a year after...", back one year there was no big fuss over all these licensing fees issues

but you can bet that sco will get brutally ass-raped if they even try to touch mr ellison's jewels. he's got a big enough ego to go mad about it, and the cash to sue sco into oblivion

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.

Re:SCO is no real threat

[tshak]

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.

No, it's because they have those resources to pay the licensing fees should the need arise.

Re:SCO is no real threat

[pong]

IMHO, there is one flaw in your analysis. Customer perception is very important so if Oracle expect the SCO law suit to hang around and get news coverage for a few years they sure as hell would not bet their money on linux.

Why is it that SCO show 80 lines of linux kernel source code that are identical to SCO Unix source code and keep claiming that there are hundreds of identical files. Files - not lines.

Re:SCO is no real threat

[mec]

Monday: Red Hat sues SCO.
Thursday: IBM sues SCO.
Friday: Oracle announces commitment to Linux.

This is a good way to do PR: a rolling wave from different sources.

Objectively, it's the same total amount of commitment to Linux whether everybody does it in one day or they do it three weeks apart. But this timing feeds the news cycle better.

I'm hoping that Google will issue a press release soon. And then a behemoth retailer, like Home Depot. And then a brokerage firm, like Merrill Lynch.

Re:SCO is no real threat

[pmz]

Oracle's products are the mainstay of the database industry and moving to Linux shows that Microsoft does not in fact have a monopoly.

Only in the context of database servers. Microsoft does have a monopoly on the desktop regarding office productivity software and gaming. Only recently, have Linux, the BSDs, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, etc. begun to get enough mind-share such that Microsoft's desktop monopoly is jepardized. Note that Microsoft's monopoly is so entrenched that only FREE products could compete.

It is annoying when people look at the whole software industry as one market, when it is really thousands upon thousands of markets. Each category of software application (operating system, database, word processor, strategy game, action game, calendars, etc.) is a whole market distinct from all others.

Look at the automotive industry, for example. Sure, there is a market for whole cars, but each car is made up of thousands of components. If you look around, there are distinct markets for each component. Want a snazzier tachometer? There are several companies eager and willing to sell you one. Note that even the market for whole cars can be broken down into heavy-duty trucks, light-duty trucks, vans, family sedans, sports cars, wannabe sports cars, compacts, etc.

There is nothing special about software that frees it from traditional and long-worn concepts in the business world. Of course, there will always be the issues of "is it art" vs. "is it a truck", but those are mostly due to the diversity and immaturity of the software industry.

God I Love It

[Col. Panic]

Oracle drops support for Netware in favor of Linux.

Novell buys Symian.

Oracle adopts Linux internally.

And the peasants danced.

Larry Hates Bill

[Crashmarik]

This isnt so much about linux as its about Larry Ellison turning plaid whenever somebody mentions to him Bill G is much wealthier than he is.

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).

Re:What'd they have before?

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Undeniably, a large loss for Sun, too. But this migration fails to demonstrate what many want: that a non-technical workforce can move from Windows to Linux. You have neither a non-technical workforce, nor a workforce that is trained and comfortable with Windows.

Wake me when Geico moves their entire org, including sales agents, to Linux. Until then, while these moves are good, it only demonstrates the preference of engineer types, not marketing types. Unfortunately, there are a lot more marketing types than engineer types in the world.

Re:What'd they have before?

[nettdata]

Dude-

Don't make the assumption that everybody at Oracle is a code writer... there are LOTS, and I mean LOTS, of non-technical people working there. Just because it's a software company doesn't mean that every, or even most, employees are technical. And, most of them were initially running Windows.

Hell, Larry himself will be running Linux instead of Windows, as that's no different than all the marketing people, product managers, doc writers, etc., that are not "technical".

That's about as much of a non-technical workforce as you can get in modern business, even though they may have technical components.

It's not like the coders are going to drop everything and teach people how it all works.

Re:What'd they have before?

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Don't make the assumption that everybody at Oracle is a code writer... there are LOTS, and I mean LOTS, of non-technical people working there. Just because it's a software company doesn't mean that every, or even most, employees are technical.

I understand that; I would agree that only a sizable minority of the employees are technically inclined. I should have said so in my previous post.

That's about as much of a non-technical workforce as you can get in modern business, even though they may have technical components

However, I don't see that as being true. You don't think that Geico has less technical knowledge in it's corporate culture than does Oracle? Or even Ford? I think so, and I think one of those conversions would be much more interesting, and relevant, to more corporations. When Munich gets deployed, and feedback comes in, is when Linux proponents will know how likely Penguin World Domination really is.

Re:What'd they have before?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also posting anonymously because I work for Oracle

Probably a fair bit of Sun gear has been involved, but I do know that the servers our internal E-Business suite used to run on were HP/UX.

Also, we no longer have any NT file servers - all been migrated to Oracle Files Online running on Linux.

As far a distributions are concerned, pretty much anytime anyone talks about linux here it is RedHat Advanced Server 2.1. Remember - we are talking about servers here. We have a pretty strong relationship with RH, and I can't see us 'rolling our own'. We're a database company. (of course that hasn't stopped us before.)

Just wish they would support us 'early adopters' running our non-existant* linux desktops better - in terms of 'well, it works on Windows/IE so you should be using that'

*well, according to all the 'anal-ysts' they don't exist

Re:What'd they have before?

[afidel]

I doubt it Geicko is probably like most insurance companies, they probably have a very large developer base. I can't speak to Geicko specifically but Progressive is based near me and I know several people who work there. The reason Progressive is so tech focused is that they don't really sell insurance. Insurance is just a way to get volumes of dollars in house to build up their float. In most markets the amount of profit an insurance company can make per person is fairly tightly regulated, and Progressive will often be below even this level, because they want to build up volume. The services of actually offering and distributing on the insurance is just costs, which is why they try to minimize these operations through technology. It might seem to the consumer that the fast claims process is there for them but it is really there to minimize the number of claims adjusters they need in any given area. They also have their strong web presence which is convenient for customers and cheap for them to process. Minimizing these costs allows them to maxamize the profit from the return on their float. Other than developers their largest employment area is probably call centers, for those users it doesn't matter what they run, it's probably just an interface to a black screen app or a modern GUI on front of a similar backend, which can easily be developed for Linux, for the remaining part of the staff (adjusters, actuaries and admin staff), they will simply have training costs, probably not significant compared to the savings achievable on the whole enterprise, or they can leave those personell on Windows.

8000 developers?

[YetAnotherName]

...and they still can't make an sqlplus client that supports readline.

Yes, I'm trolling. You would too, if you had to deal with Oracle on a daily basis---contractual obligations, you see. (Where's my MySQL when you need it?)

Re:8000 developers?

[Papineau]

Could this have something to do with readline being GPL'd, and Oracle not wanting to release sqlplus under it?

Of course, readline (although it already exists) is something, functionnally, which could be reimplemented relatively easily by 8000 developpers.

Re:8000 developers?

[YrWrstNtmr]

And maybe they can get 9i to actually work reliably with various flavors of Linux, instead of throwing various subtle (and not-so-subtle) errors when it feels like it.

Re:8000 developers?

[Permission Denied]

Could this have something to do with readline being GPL'd, and Oracle not wanting to release sqlplus under it?

Most likely.

The readline folks are real fanatics. They've continually denied requests to put readline under LGPL - they want to make sure the only things that use readline are GPLed. That is, they're doing this on purpose.

Because of this debacle, the *BSD camp was forced to come up with the editline library for all their stuff. And then you have stuff like Sun's dbx that has its own readline replacement. And Oracle's SQL client, and Sybase's isql, and sqsh, ....

Now, it's not quite trivial to write a readline replacement because you have to deal with all sorts of crufty, non-portable *nix terminal arcana, but it's also not difficult. The problem is that all readline replacements are incompatible with each other. You can customize readline applications through .inputrc - this is really cool because you can make one binding and it works in bash, gdb, your (GPLed) console mp3 player, etc. However, these bindings won't carry over to FreeBSD's cdcontrol program or Sun's dbx.

The GPL also means that I can't use readline for some program I write for a client because these programs are usually internal company things that the company owns and can license however they want - they won't pay me if I stipulate that the code I wrote (which belongs to them) must be licensed under GPL for such a trivial reason. Since my clients won't be too happy paying me to write stupid terminal IO routines, I'm forced to either use plain old fgets or use editline, which (IMHO) is not as nice as readline.

The fanaticism is costing the *nix community some useful functionality, which is kind of sad.

Re:8000 developers?

[spitzak]

No you are thinking the LGPL. readline is the canonical (and perhaps only) example of the GPL actually harming development by blocking off something that is actually useful for development. Even if you intend to make your new program GPL there is incentive to not use it, as you might change your mind, also the inability to use it also makes you not learn it.

In most cases the GPL is applied to end-user programs where the only reason to link to them them would be to make a closed-source ripoff. Actually useful libraries that make it easier to write programs are almost always LGPL or similar.

Re:8000 developers?

[farnsworth]

...and they still can't make an sqlplus client that supports readline.

Do you need sophisticated, automated input? Use sqlloader. Need sophisticated, automated output? Use rman. Need sophisticated, automated schema management? Use sqlplus.

Oracle comes with gobs of very powerful tools, and sqlplus is just not designed to do what you think it should be doing. It seems like you are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. It's like complaining that climbing a fire escape is hard when you live on the third flool. Use the stairs.

BTW, if your doing SW development with oracle, use tora(free) or toad($$$). Both these tools make poking around and doing arbitrary queries a snap. Or, take your pick of the thousands of jdbc-based apps that live on sourceforge.

Re:8000 developers?

[bzhou]

Work around: get readline source code (I'm using 4.3), build and install example/rlfe, alias sqlplus='rlfe sqlplus'. This program can transparently add readline to command line programs unaware of readline.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Half right

[Anonymous Coward]

There is precioius little Larry likes more than shoving his thumb into BillG's eye. But it makes perfect sense for them. The OS is free, and it runs nearly everywhere; you can see exactly what it's doing because you can see (and modify) the source code.

As a target platform for their software, it's perfect. Why run Oracle on Windows if you can use Linux on Intel? And if you don't want to spring for the expensive hardware, you aren't gonna use a proprietary Unix.

Obligatory Python paraphrasing ...

[YetAnotherName]

Simple: Larry Ellison is bucking for a role in the remake of the classic Python skit, Episode 41, Nigel Ellis.

PA System: Would Mister Larry Ellis please go straight to the manager's office? I'll repeat that...
(Larry wheels round and listens)
PA System: Will Mister Larry Mellish please go straight to the manager's office?

ad hoc calculator

[Anonymous Coward]

8000 developers * 700 dollars = 7 * 800000 = 5600000 dollars. Am i right? Subtract $8000 if you want, then the bill is $5592000.00.

Re:ad hoc calculator

[mcpkaaos]

For those of you (like myself) who had a difficult time reading the currency values without the appropriate commas, I'd like to present my contribution to the parent post:

, yada yada (some math) , ,, yada yada yada? yada , yada yada ,,.

Linux on the desktop

[chunkwhite86]

"Oracle will move its base development platform to Linux, including putting the open-source operating system on the workstations of 8,000 developers"

Maybe this will answer the question "Is Linux ready for the desktop?" for other major corporations. Yes, a developer workstation is a "desktop" if it's their main business machine.

A heavyweight desktop-linux push is what is going to get businesses off the proprietary MS office file formats. When people realize that they are tied to .DOC .XLS and .PPT - and not tied to Windows per se, this is what will cause the widespread adoption of a truely open business document file format.

Re:Linux on the desktop

[swordgeek]

Linux ready for the desktop? Sure--it's finally catching up to Solaris, which has been on the desktop for decades!

Seriously, developers are the people who run Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, and so help me AIX on their workstations. As often as not, they've got a PC running Windows so they can read their corporate email, but for nearly 20 years, developers in Unix app shops have had Unix workstations on their desk. Putting Linux there says nothing about Linux's readiness for the "desktop" in the general sense.

Re:Linux on the desktop

[Xoro]

Yes, a developer workstation is a "desktop" if it's their main business

Agreed, but I don't think you have to rationalize what qualifies as a "desktop" in that way. This move puts the all flaws of the linux desktop in front of 8,000 people ... who can fix them. Think of the bonanza for desktop linux projects if just 1% of these developers started submitting patches.

For an Open Source project, being put on 8,000 office worker desks would certainly be a sign of maturity and acceptance. Getting your project in front of 8,000 qualified developers is a gold mine.

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.

Nice, but...

[Tar-Palantir]

Could've happened to a nicer company. Ellison won one of the Golden Jackboot awards for pushing a national ID card system backed by Oracle databases. Here's the Google link for the stories.

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.

So with all the cost savings they're getting

[Flower]

by deploying linux, does it mean they'll pass that along to their customers?

Sometimes I just crack myself up.

Resigned Sept 2002

[bstadil]

Ellison No Longer board member of Apple.

Re:Symian?

[Col. Panic]

your first assumption was correct - i cnat speel

Re:Good News

[Stephen Samuel]

Linux adoption itself has not been a problem (IMHO) for most realistic companies. However, converting 8000 developers over to Linux is a massive and interesting concept.

Not as big as you'd think (at least not for the developers). The base platform for Oracle (AFIK) is Solaris. The differences between Solaris and Linux aren't that nasty -- besides they already have to be linux-awere in their development tasks, anyways. It'll be a bit more work for the admins who'll need to learn which linux system tools replace the Sun-specific ones, but even that's not a lot, and there are probably fewer admins at Oracle than developers.

Re:Hey SCO!

[hedley]

I am sure they got one of the 1500 letters sent out. Them and nVidia are two very big linux shops in the CA Bay Area. nVidia in particular has video of their data centre touting how many 1000's of SMP machines they have.

I am sure SCO hears the dinner bell. Too bad all they are going to eat is the ashes of their stock certificates.

It's about time.

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Definitely time for non-Microsoft bigcorps like Oracle to put their money where their mouths are. Seems ironic that companies like Oracle, with thousands of desktops, would continue putting money directly into Microsoft's coffers by buying Windows and Office -- money that will be used to finance Microsoft's attempted destruction of both Linux and competitors like Oracle.

If every company that Microsoft directly competed with (Oracle, AOL, Sony, Nintendo, IBM, Palm, RealNetworks, Novell, just to name a few) were to boycott Microsoft products for their internal use (still keeping, of course, whatever they need to do development of products which run on or with Windows) ... that alone could add up to hundreds of thousands of seats. That's a lot of revenue Microsoft wouldn't be able to collect.

Once the Oracle IT folks finish switching developer desktops over to Linux, they should then begin switching over their administrative staff as well. If Sun can run a multi thousand seat corporate network on *ix, so can any large company. If all Microsoft competitors followed suit, it would create enough momentum to jump-start mainstream adoption of the Linux desktop that much sooner.

MySQL/Oracle = Apple/Orange

[SuperBanana]

(Where's my MySQL when you need it?)

Comparing MySQL to Oracle is like comparing a leaking dinghy to the Queen Elizabeth II. MySQL may be used by a lot of companies, but it's still a joke compared to even other open source SQL databases like PostgreSQL. Not to mention it seems like they're always having licensing issues(to the extent that MySQL support has been pulled from the PHP 5.0 development branch).

You want a serious, professional, stable database? Oracle, DB2, Sybase, etc. No money? Try PostgreSQL. MySQL substitutes some crazy locking in place of real transaction support. PostgreSQL not only doesn't need to lock tables for most operations, but it also supports very sophisticated locking. Oh, and did I mention PostgreSQL is object-oriented? The only two thing PostgreSQL is lacking is good replication support in the main release(it's still in development, I believe). That and full text searching is kinda funky(although very sophisticated).

I've seen so many "performance problems" that were due almost entirely to lack of proper database functionality in MySQL.

I can hear the scriptkiddies(PHP scriptkiddies) now chanting "it's lighter weight, it's faster". Guess what? You can make PostgreSQL just as fast if you turn off various sanity checks(these checks are better than what MySQL does) AND the more complete implementation of SQL actually lets you do more powerful(or perhaps efficient) queries. Who finishes a house first, the guy with a hammer and saw, or the guy with a truck full of tools?

Re:MySQL/Oracle = Apple/Orange

[pavera]

I'm developing a postgresql database right now,
and wow does postgre suck for development. You better get all of your table declarations perfect the very first time and never EVER, EVER have to change them AT ALL, because once you have one row of data in there, forget about it. T

he only way to edit a column definition is to delete it and readd it with the correct properties, which means taking the DB offline, copying the whole table to a temporary table, deleting the offending column, readding the column, and then moving all of the data back into the old table from the temporary one, and now since your columns are in a different order, you have to play fun games to get that to work right.. then you can delete the temporary table, and put the DB back online, PURE TORTURE.

MYSQL completely supports editing column definitions on the fly, thought 20 characters was enough for a column, but now you need 50? no problem. Thought 3 sig dig was enough for that decimal field, but now you need 8? Go for it... No such support whatever in PostgreSQL.

Re:MySQL/Oracle = Apple/Orange

[kcbrown]

The only way to edit a column definition is to delete it and readd it with the correct properties, which means taking the DB offline, copying the whole table to a temporary table, deleting the offending column, readding the column, and then moving all of the data back into the old table from the temporary one, and now since your columns are in a different order, you have to play fun games to get that to work right.. then you can delete the temporary table, and put the DB back online, PURE TORTURE.

You, sir, are full of shit. Witness (the output isn't exactly what you'd see because of the crappy lameness filter and the limited Slashdot HTML options):

kevin> \d
No relations found.
kevin> create table foo (x integer, y varchar(20), z float);
CREATE TABLE
kevin> insert into foo (x, y, z) values (2, 'hello', 20.5);
INSERT 16997 1
kevin> select * from foo;
x y z
2 hello 20.5
(1 row)

kevin> begin;
BEGIN
kevin> alter table foo add column z2 integer;
ALTER TABLE
kevin> update foo set z2 = z;
UPDATE 1
kevin> alter table foo drop column z;
ALTER TABLE
kevin> alter table foo rename column z2 to z;
ALTER TABLE
kevin> select * from foo;
x y z
2 hello 20
(1 row)

kevin> \d foo
Table "public.foo"
Column Type Modifiers
x integer
y character varying(20)
z integer

kevin> rollback;
ROLLBACK
kevin> \d foo
Table "public.foo"
Column Type Modifiers
x integer
y character varying(20)
z double precision

So: not only can you do the operation without taking the database down, you can do it while within a transaction, and even rollback the entire change if you screw up!

This is under PostgreSQL 7.3.3.

Try that with your vaunted MySQL.

Re:MySQL/Oracle = Apple/Orange

[m_ilya]

It is not that painless. We usually do in our db migration scripts:

1. start transaction
2. rename existing table
3. create a table with new table definition
4. copy data from old table to new
5. drop old table
6. commit transaction

Works well for any table definition changes. Doesn't require taking the DB offline. Doesn't change order of columns unless you want it.

Watching the games of ....

[3seas]

Seems to me that corporate is playing ping pong with Linux....

A good first step

[Norman Lorrain]

OSS marches on!!

Next they should migrate to PostgreSQL for their databases.

Oh. yeah.

More info

[mbadolato]

There's another article here which offers a little more information, including the following, regarding PHP support:

Rozwat also provided new details on the launch of the Oracle Open Source Development Center -- an online service available through Oracle's online developer network, OTN. The new service will provide developers with software, sample code and extensive tutorials, free-of-charge. Additionally, the company has extended its support for scripting language PHP, including full integration and shipping with Oracle 9i Application Server.

"It is our goal to be a value-add to the developer community," added Rozwat. "With the development of the OSDC and our extended support of PHP, we continue to invest in the Linux development community. This will be an ongoing priority for us." Rozwat also noted that there have been more than 1 million downloads of Oracle software for Linux, illustrating the extensive, growing use of Oracle together with Linux.

But what happens when open source comes after them

[The Revolutionary]

Sure, it's easy for companies to see open source as a platform or environment for their products, but what happens when open source starts to move into their territory?

Of course Microsoft doesn't like open source solutions. Open source solutions are already, and are increasingly so, in direct competition with the products that make up their revenue stream.

Not all of these companies that are jumping on the open source bandwagon are going to be understanding and cooperative when open source comes knocking on their door: their revenue stream.

In fact, I'd venture to guess that the majority of them will be anything but understanding and cooperative. These companies are not adopting open source solutions because they want to advance the common good. They are not doing this out of community spirit. These companies are jumping on the open source bandwagon because they see it as a good economic decision; this is the bottom line.

When their bottom line is threatened, they will turn around, lash out, and bite the hand that feeds them.

They may not succeed, but they will try, and I for one know that I do not want to be the developer contributing to software that infringes whatever wealth of patents they are holding when that time comes.

...at least not if I can be held liable, which, if I am a start-up distributing this competing open source solution as part of a package to support my service-based company, certainly I can be.

I do not trust our new corporate bed-fellows.

I do not trust our legal system to protect me from them.

I do not trust our policy makers to even care about protecting me from them.

Oh that I could. Fortunately, or unfortunately, people like me just don't matter in this country of ours.

Well, if nothing else, at least our votes can help the existing power structure project the illusion that we ever had a real, actualizable opportunity to have our interests represented.

And that should be good enough for me, right?

Right?

?

Oh stop your bellyaching.

[moogla]

Plenty of people
have gotten it to work

Oracle not all that serious about Linux desktops

[dcavanaugh]

At my company, we run Oracle Financials. We use a stupid little Windows app called jinitiator to launch the "javatized" version of Oracle Forms. Unfortunately, Oracle refuses to release a Linux version of jinitiator, despite what is probably hundreds of requests/complaints on Metalink and thousands more that really want the product. Java is supposed to mean platform independence, but somehow we get stuck with Windows anyway. All this rhetoric about Oracle supporting Linux is great, but the action is another story.

Re:has anyone implemented Oracle on Linux

[ziegast]

Have things changed?

A "few years ago" was the height of Sun's dot com bubble. If you wanted to run Oracle reliably, you bought Sun/Solaris/Sparc servers along with expensive storage hardware. Trying anything else was "risky". Compared to now, Linux was far more experimental. Oracle had just announced it was going to support Linux. Oracle's support for linux helped put companies like RedHat and VA Linux on the map. Early pioneers tried Oracle on Linux and bot burned. It's gotten alot better today now that Oracle doesn't have to keep chasing the moving target of the distribution du jour or kernel of the month to support their customers.

My biggest gripe about implementing Oracle on Linux is installation. Even with a generic RedHat Advanced Server install (one of their "supported" stable platforms), there are problems with with linking libraries or even just using unzip that just don't seem to make sense (should have been caught in QA). If you don't use their blessed commercial Linux OS distributions, you won't find any suppport from Oracle and scant support from the metalink user community. It helps if you know Unix/Linux enough to debug their shell scripts to figure out what's breaking.

Once we were done installation, our applications and databases ran similar Solaris systems (i.e. knowing how to make patches, managing backups, etc.). Our previously-Sparc-based DBA felt at home using the database tools on Linux. The best part is that our hardware and OS combined cost 25% comparable Sun hardware. We could afford to buy two servers and use the other as a cold backup. If we ever run out of memory, it's dirt cheap to buy more PC DDR SDRAM.

Now that Oracle is reportedly using Linux everywhere, perhaps they'll tune their installation process.

- a sysadmin

Re:But what happens when open source comes after t

[roystgnr]

Sure, it's easy for companies to see open source as a platform or environment for their products, but what happens when open source starts to move into their territory?

They either freak out and commit SCOicide, or they try and find more territory.

So far Oracle seems to have been doing the latter. It's not as if there aren't any open source databases, it's just that people trust Oracle to provide features and performance beyond what the alternatives currently deliver. If the alternatives catch up, then Oracle will have to produce something else to make their products more valuable.

And really, is there anything wrong with that? It isn't exactly common economic practice to make a product once and then expect to sell the same product over and over again until the end of time. The Econ 101 rule that price tends toward marginal cost is oversimplified, but it's not that far off, and with software your marginal cost is zero. Even if you never had price warring competitors or open source alternatives to worry about, eventually you run out of customers, who don't need to purchase your product twice because it never wears out.

About Larry...

[Nybble's Byte]

I never thought I'd have something to like about Larry Ellison. Maybe there's a ray of hope for him. On second thought, nah, forget I said that.

Re:But what happens when open source comes after t

[The Revolutionary]

I think that what will have to happen is for an enterprise solution provider to see the stronger position to be to differentiate on the services provided rather than on the software its services are based upon.

When this happens, this solution provider will be able to be open to an open source development model. So long as the solution provider finds that the stronger position is to differentiate on the software on which their services are based, or that this software contributes to their ability to differentiate themselves, the provider will not be willing to consider an open source development model.

If an open source, corporate funded, development model is superior in this arena, I think it is just a matter of time before we see a shift in the decisions of solution providers who do not have the market share they they are after, or are uncertain of their ability to maintain their current market share.

If this happens, depending upon who makes the move first, I think it is then that we might expect to see legal tension with open source solutions at the enterprise level.

Oracle's database developers reaction?

[christophersaul]

Solaris has been the development platform for the database for a long time. Solaris/Sparc still offer a lot of things Linux can't in technical terms and Oracle RAC, a cornerstone of Oracle sales reps' comp plans runs extremely well on Sun.

Changing the base development platform is a big move.

The Linux decision seems mainly to be a strategic business move driven from the top.

I'd be very interested to know how Oracle's developers feel towards the Linux move. They're the guys who really know the technical advantages between the various platforms Oracle runs on.

Re:Ok troll I will bite

[kcbrown]

We have been running postgresql for about 3 years in a production environment. The problem with postgresql is that number one it does not scale worth a shit. Number two it cannot be kept online 24/7 that in itself is some major faults. I run a system with databases consisting of simple data only about 15 million records or so. If we load on more than about 20 simultaneous users is slows to a grinding halt.

It seems that people's experiences vary on this. Certainly your complaints were valid in the pre-7.0 days, but PostgreSQL has improved an amazing amount since then, especially after the introduction of 7.2. The current stable version is 7.3.4, and 7.4 is right around the corner.

Much of the scalability issue you mention has to do with the default settings regarding shared memory, buffers, etc. The PostgreSQL developers have been very conservative about the defaults, because they want the database to run on the widest range of hardware possible. Unfortunately that leads to a "least common denominator" approach and the end result is a database that out of the box performs suboptimally on most systems in order to run on almost all of them.

But if you change the tunable parameters to values that are much closer to the actual hardware you're running the database on, the performance increases a great deal.

Some people have gotten very good scalability out of PostgreSQL as a result. I'm sure you're aware of the PHPBuilder article that talks largely about the scalability issues. That was written some time ago, and PostgreSQL has gotten quite a lot better since then.

It doesn't work for everyone. MySQL has the advantage of having a rudimentary replication mechanism out of the box, and its full-text indexing is much easier to set up and use. It's also much easier to upgrade between major versions (PostgreSQL requires that you dump and restore if you're upgrading to a new major version, e.g. 7.3 -> 7.4). But in the general case, PostgreSQL seems to me to be a much more capable database than MySQL is.

I don't know of any other database, commercial or otherwise, that allows you to write stored procedures in Perl, Python, or TCL. That alone might be worth the few tradeoffs.

If you're running a relatively old (7.1 or earlier) version of PostgreSQL, you might want to give 7.3.4 a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.

So Larry Ellison is the new Hero???

[btakita]

Hmm,

Here's Larry Ellison. He told us he wants to buy out People Soft and lay off a bunch of people.
But, He's the hero because he likes Linux (more like he hates Microsoft and will use anything to make him top DAWG).

And then look at the "evil" Bill Gates.
He donated $15 Billion to charity and has plans to employ 5000 people.

Yes, I'm happy that Linux is being widely used, but Is it fair to create such a dichotomy of Good and Evil??

Will we demonize Bill Gates and trumpet Larry Ellison as a hero? Aren't they the at least the same breed?

And then, are we any better than Bill Gates? All the "wonderful" things we "would" do if we had his money.

I hate to throw religion into this, but don't judge your neighbor for having a speck in his eye when you have a plank in your own.

Re:So Larry Ellison is the new Hero???

[I_redwolf]

I hate to throw religion into this, but don't judge your neighbor for having a speck in his eye when you have a plank in your own.

Then don't make it a religious statement. What I don't understand is this, how does an announcement of Oracle switching over their developer desktops to Linux have anything to do with making Larry Ellison a hero? Oracle has been saying they plan to move their entire infrastructure to Linux as soon as possible. This is just more of the movement becoming a reality.

Why you want to demonize either party in your diatribe above or make this out to some holy war makes you seem to be more of a zealot than not. The odd thing is that alot of Pro-Microsoft or Microsoft-biased persons are constantly screaming about how their is Linux zeal in every corner you go to. Of course, to deny that their isn't any would be stupid but I've observed the exact opposite, most if all discussions on topics like these seem to be Pro-Microsoft persons being extremely defensive and almost hostile to anything regarding Linux. Unbiased persons are alot more accepting of the concepts Linux itself is based on.

It would really help to keep your arguments about an issue actually on the issue in question and to not tie in other facts which are based on entirely different scopes and might have an undetermined amount of degrees of seperation involved.

Tux Crossing

[hackrobat]

Folks, check out these signs all over Oracle HQ if you happen to pass by that area. They seem to have been around for quite a while.

Now this is really, really cool.

[NerveGas]

There are lots of stories about how company XYZ is using Linux. However, this one has potential for a *real* benefit to Linux. Why?

Well, when Oracle, with cash flowing out of it's orifices, finds something in Linux that they'd really like to have improved, they have plenty of resources to improve it, which benefits Linux.

If some small, third-world government adopts Linux, that's great. But they're still not going to give anywhere near as much back to Linux as companies like IBM have been able to. Oracle stands a pretty good chance of giving quite a bit back as well, and I think Linux will be much better off for it.

steve

Heard that PeopleSoft will be running on Linux

[BlackListedCard]

I've heard that PeopleSoft will be the next big guy to run their products under the Linux environment. Better development platform to make changes to their product. Can anyone confirm?

Who the !#$% is "various?"

[bourne]

From the article: Oracle maintains its bullish stance on Linux, despite the copyright, intellectual-property, and unfair competition lawsuits introduced by various players in the market.

Who are the various players? SCO, SCO, and SCO?

This article makes it seem like Linux is the churning center of numberous legal actions by disparate parties, when to the best of my knowledge, there's just one bad apple (SCO) throwing (vague, unsubstantiated) accusations around weekly.

Surely if there were other Linux-related legal actions going on /. would be covering them daily!

Oracle is serious about linux desktops

[Ur@eus]

Hi,
The latest releases of 11i ERP do support running Oracle applications clients out of the box with the standard Sun java plugin under Linux. The certification process isn't done yet however, but we are working on it, so hopefully support for Linux and Solaris clients can be officially announced soon.