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Oracle To Finish Linux Makeover This Year
An anonymous reader writes "According to a CNET News article: 'Oracle will finish switching its 9,000-person in-house programming staff to Linux by the end of 2004, the database powerhouse said Wednesday. In October, the company finished the Linux transition for the 5,000 programmers of its Oracle Applications software. Now the transformation has begun for those who work on the database product, said Wim Coekaerts, director of Linux engineering, in an interview at the CeBit trade show in New York.'"
An interesting question is, how much revenue is MS going to lose as a result of much of heavyweights of the IT industry (Sun, Novell, IBM, Oracle) moving their many or all of their staff to Linux?
Seriously - all those companies pay MS considerable sums each year in licencing fees. Now MS is effectively losing all of the key players in an important sector of US industry. That's got to hurt a bit, hasn't it?
If you are spending the kind of money necessary to have a licensed copy of Oracle the cost of the hardware involved is not significant. You could run Oracle on low-end hardware but why? If you are going for a budget solution then use Postgre or MySQL.
Putting Oracle on a low-end box is like putting a $3000 stereo system in a Yugo.
I'd have thought it would be less to do any direct loss of revenue and more to do with smaller companies saying that if Linux is good enough for "Sun, Novell, IBM and Oracle" it should be good enough for us.
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We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
I have developed several large applications that involve an Oracle database as one of their components, but the idea of actually having to install Oracle anywhere sends shivers down my back (and not from joy). If this keeps up I can see future work centering around PostgreSQL, just to avoid the endless hassle associated with the installation.
Really, I like Oracle a lot, but I wish they would fix the endless installation issues...
Microsoft sometimes claims that it has more full-time programmers working on Microsoft software than there are working on Linux software.
How do they know?
It will be interesting to see what happens from Redmond HQ...if you cant beat em, join em?
Do you need a website upgrade?
Migrating development from Solaris to Linux is not that hard - they're both Unices, and in my experience, Solaris as a dev platform... to put it politely... not the best out there. For a long time there's been no decent C++ compiler, their IDE is so-so, and for compilation speeds, a Linux workstation is beating Solaris unless you are prepared to pay some serious $$$ for a large server. Now migrating development from Windows is another story - there's MS Visual suite of tools, which are generally very good (and requires a different mindset at that). Getting people of that camp to work on Linux would be much harder.
More significant, I think, is the impact on the jobs market. On one side, people looking to get jobs in these big, relatively secure (yes, I know, nowhere is secure) companies will ensure that they have Linux skills on their resume. And at the other end, people looking to move on from these companies will be trained up in Linus, ready to act as advocates in their new employers or startups, and pressuring hirers to use Linux because the skills are available.
This is not a major event, but it is a good straw in the wind. At the moment everybody uses Microsoft because everybody uses Microsoft. When it is obvious that not everybody uses Microsoft, people will put more thought into what they should uses - giving Linux a level playing field.
And yes, I have read that Oracle is dumping Solaris, not M$. But it is not the jumping off that matters, it is the jumping on. They are still giving more credibility, both as an employer and as a software manufacturer, to Linux).
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
They will be working "on" Linux ( that is, they will be running it on their desktop ), but they will not be working "on" Linux ( writing code for the OS ). Oracle developers will be working on Oracle software.
Switching the programming staff from Solaris to Linux is no big deal. I'd be much more interested to hear what Oracle is doing with the PHBs, secretaries, marketers and other non-technical staff. I bet they're still on Windows.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
It is my impression that Linux has momentum, but I think Sun is suffering more than Microsoft. To date, most of the major server migrations have been large companies switching from proprietary Unix systems to Linux.
However, it is effectively consolidating the Unix market into more or less a single front, which makes it a more formidable opponent to Windows in the long run.
My anecdotal observation shows a slow-simmering movement to open source in general by the "proles" of the IT industry: bread-and-butter IT departments for hospitals, industrial firms, etc, who don't really care about software religion, but just want to save money over the long haul. I knew when a friend of mine told me that the CIO of his rural hospital system was looking to migrate to OpenOffice/StarOffice to save costs, a slow movement based on raw economics was underway, techie religions be damned.
These types of migrations can stay under the radar for a long time before hitting a critical mass. Watching this unfold will keep things interesting, if nothing else.