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Oracle Embraces Mozilla
kiggs writes "According to this article from eWeek, Oracle Corp. is ready to extend its 'Linux Everywhere' campaign to client systems. At next week's LinuxWorld in New York, Oracle will announce that it will enable the Mozilla open-source Web browser to run Oracle applications in the coming year.
Dave Dargo, vice president of Oracle's Linux Program Office and the Performance Engineering team within its Platform Technologies Division, says that Oracle will look to expand its 1.5-year-old Linux support program by supporting Linux not just as a server but as a client."
I trust Oracle about as much as I trust Microsoft. Let's hope they don't set their sights on acquisition, because their algorithm goes "embrace-acquire-mediocrify-priceincrease"
Will this have any impact on Firebird, which is the sweetest browser I ever did use?
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
Time for you karma whores: could you tell me (and the unwashed masses lingering around here) what 'oracle applications' we'd want to run from our Moz? What do I miss if I have never ever thought on doing so?
The fact that Jinitiator (Oracle's JVM) has only worked for windows has been the last reason my company hasn't been able to switch to linux.
All of our Novell stuff now has Linux ports, and OpenOffice suits most of us just fine. Hopefully this is the last piece of the puzzle.
It would also be really cool if the apps could run through LTSP.
The article doesn't specifically name a Linux Jinitiator, but I would be more than happy if they got the apps to run using a more recent Sun JVM for Mozilla.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
To each his own, but the only thing I use IE for is to check for windows updates
When I try using Windows Update with Mozilla, it asks me if I want to download IE. Of course, they argue that IE is integrated into the OS, so this makes no sense.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
There's actually a shred of wisdom in the poster's wit. If it weren't for a single company dominating PC software, there would be a lot less motivation to find an open source alternatives. Without Microsoft, the choice was (and probably still would be) between several crappy closed source software venders. It is because of MS's predatory and evil ways the Linux has become the alternative of choice. And maybe Bill will drown in all that free beer!
This is an extremely smart move on Oracles behalf, imho.
One would think that moving to service orientation would be the way to go, with OSS critical mass just around the corner.
But this proves that Oracle is thinking further, where OSes are only a commodity and clients networking capabilites count.
By extending Mozilla with their stuff they're adding a feature to Oracle that others don't have (yet), despite the fact that Oracle DB probably has had these features for years. Clients for free, server service capable software for good ol' cash. This move will do two things for Oracle: It will establish their image as early adapters and full supporters of OSS *and* it will let them maintain their standard business model a little longer: selling bizarely priced DBs and other software stuff.
Very smart indeed.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I agree. The article was exceptionally poor on describing what they intended to do. I can only assume that they are talking about modifying Mozilla to interpret more than strait HTML. I suppose this would make it useful for internal applications for companies that extensively use Oracle but all it will really do is mask the poor programing skills of coders who cannot write a good enough application to work within the limits of HTML. The end result will be applications that are not internet ready and have all the wierd bugs that comes with client side code execution. Don't even get me started on the fact that your probably going to have to let end users connect directly to your database. But of course Oracle is unhackable :)
> Free software is communist?
In the good way, yes. Not in the Soviet (bad) way.
You may also point out that in that context you are describing the scientific method which is also communist. However, you may also note that not everything is accepted back (into the community). Only the most innovative/noteworthy solutions actually make it into code. In that respect, I agree 100% with "communism".
Oracle does support KHTML.
The marketroids folks might not know it, but the fact is that it just plains work. At least with Apple's Safari, wich is KHTML.
(Safari, BTW, is a dedicated-to target on Mac OS X, at least for the OCS product line).
Oracle Applications use a custom Java framework they call J-Initiator. This is Windows only at the time.
I find it funny that Oracle is now supporting Linux instead of just saying they support it, in fact now Red Hat Advanced server on Dell hardware is their platform of choice. Less than a year ago they were not even maintaining most of their Linux products.
This is the best saturday EVER!!!! Woohooo!
1;
the difference between an application using 100% of the capability of the existing web standards, and 100% of the capability thats available in IE6, in particular, is enormous.
Yes - the one using web standards will look better and be more powerful.
I suggest you read up on higher-level DOM and CSS standards. IE only supports about 5% of what the standards specify, which is why you think the standards suck. But there is nothing - nothing - that you can do with IE6's proprietary extensions, that you can not do using 100% standard XHTML/CSS.
Oracle had their own browser back in the mid 90's when the IE and Netscape battle was heating up. What ever happened to the Oracle Power Browser?
I also work at Oracle but I am not sure if you have noticed in the last 6 months more and more sites have started working in Mozilla. I use Mozilla by default and if that does not work then open up just that page in IE. With a little tweaking you can run Oracle Apps in Mozilla. So I do not think that it will be that long before the target of 100% compatability with Mozilla is achieved.
As far as the question about having a Linux desktop is concerned, I am not sure if you know but Global IT @Oracle has been considering it and evaluvating it for about a year now, right after we migrated all the Application development servers to Linux from Solaris. So I would assume that in about a year or so, one would have the option of installing Linux if they wanted to.
As I see the only thing that is stopping Oracle from moving to Linux only desktop is partly inertia and partly dependence on software like Visio, MS Project etc.
Precisely. Oracle is going to write their applications so that they take advantage of the rich client opportunities that XUL provides. They are going to use Mozilla as a platform in much the same way that the Komodo IDE is based on Mozilla. XUL allows developers to do much more than they could with just HTML.
This is a great opportunity to show what Mozilla is truly capable of. In may ways Mozilla offers today what Microsoft is only planning to release with Longhorn. Not to mention the fact that Mozilla is Free Software and platform independent. It's made to order for developing and releasing rich client applications on a wide variety of platforms.
This is true even on Linux and Solaris because at it's core JInitiator is Java-based.
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins isn't gonna do it, and the applications launcher page is using a the object tag instead of the applet one.
Care to give the linux version of the hack?
Dropping the windows jinitiator dll into
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
Microsoft has nothing to do with motivating open source.
That's a pretty naive statement. Sure GNU and free software was around, but how many people and companies now support OSS because of their disdain toward MS? The new licensing scheme released by MS is pushing even more people into the OSS camp and thus motivating them.
I believe it is a yin and yang type of thing. Without the single big closed source company driving people away, OSS may never have gotten the critical mass of users that it has today.
actually, it was the unix wars that sprung forth the opensource movement, and if it werent microsoft, it would be IBM or Apple.
and people would still like free stuff.