Oracle Continues Warming Up to Open Source

ErikPeterson writes to tell us that News.com is running a story about a partnership between IBM and Oracle. This partnership is to help "ensure that Oracle's packaged applications run natively--that is, without modification or special translators--on the majority of IBM's WebSphere-branded middleware, including its application server and portal, plus Big Blue's recently announced Process Server."

Comments

Re:Finallly!!!!!

[njcoder]

If anyone missed the sarcastic tone, the point is the summary doesn't reflect the headline. Hell the article headline doesn't reflect the article. There's one small line how Oracle is going to make it easier to integrate Sprinng and Hybernate into their app server. That's the only Open Source bit.

It shouldn't be a big deal to use Oracle's J2EE applications on WebSphere. Had they written their applications to use only J2EE specified classes/methods/packages there shouldn't be a major problem porting one application to another app server. Unfortunately a lot of App Server vendors write their own extensions to the specification that if used causes this problem. It's good that the vendors are inovating before something even becomes a JSR but it can cause portability problems.

Oracle's app server hasn't gotten much momentum behind it. Some people may use it if they already are using Oracle and don't care too much about their app server but the App server market leaders are BEA and IBM. Some of the cool features in Oracle RAC depend on an Oracle App server. So if you're commited to a different app server then you're going to have some issues to work with. I think some of their transaction failover stuff depends on OAS.

What Oracle should do is make modifications to their application so that it's a pure J2EE application that can run on any certified app server. That seems like the better thing to do. Hopefully that's what they do and this is just some PR bullshit with IBM.

When Oracle announcces they're apps will run on JBoss and any other open source appservers that have been certified then you can say Oracle is warming up to open source.

Marketing speak - and 5 years old

[gtoomey]

What on earth has this go to do with open source? If they mean Linux, all this is saying is that Oracle gurantees it runs on Linux but that has been the case for 5 years. I think the editors should read and understand stories before posting.

Too little too late

[Mensa Babe]

It might have been a good idea in the bad old days but today when we already have a stable, production ready, rock solid, ACID-compliant open-source relational database management system of choice, Oracle will never truly succeed in "warming up to open source". It's the same mistake that the record industry has made in the early nineties all over again. They missed the train. Sad but true.

Re:Finallly!!!!!

[iwan-nl]

No. Eclipse is the open-source version of Websphere Studio (the IDE), not Websphere (the application server).

A better summary for readers

[standards]

- Oracle plans to be chummy with IBM products.
- There is a passing mention of Apache and Hibernate.
- Not worth reading unless you have a strong fetish for IBM and Oracle.

Re:nothing to do with open source

[Daytona955i]

While I do think your post is funny, Oracle is doing good things for open source. Not only have they contributed code to the linux kernel, they currently have their unbreakable linux campaign where if you are running a trusted version of linux (basically if you run Enterprise Red Hat, SuSE, and one other version I can't remember right now) and you find a serious bug in the linux kernel (ie. not Oracle's software) they will fix it and submit the patch.

There's a little more to it than that but they are doing a lot for the open source community.