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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."
It's a purely poplularity determined phenomenon. If their customers want it for platform XYZ and Oracle sees big bucks coming from them - they will partner up with Satan himself. People have been telling me that Oracle on Linux will drive migration to Linux. I think that Oracle is just riding on Linux rather than vice versa.
Ah, all those flame wars on the LUG lists... I'm pretty sure this move doesn't have anything to do with the fact that whatever IBM has is Open Source - just a business decision based on popularity.Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
This is not a troll. If IBM wants to become an OSS company - they should open up their programs - especially DB2. It is a nightmare to use that in collaboration with Samba, LDAP etc.
So who do I see as OSS companies? Red Hat and Novell are my 2 big ones.
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
wow lots of links not much content. let's see postgreasql has just now managed to be able to do a point in time recovery, I mean within the last year. lets see oracle has been doing this sence the late 80's wow just wow, I'm so fuckin impressed. Tell me when postgresql can do a tablespace point in time recovery, or has a process based backup and recovery suite and then I may give you a bit of credence. And no I'm not saying that postgresql is bad I'm just saying it's /= to oracle.
The point is still correct.. All the article is talking about is some vague interoperability with popular free software packages.
In business terms, this is roughly saying "there are several applications that have become very popular, we will allow people to buy our expensive/closed/restrictively-licensed software to work with those popular applications". Big fucking deal. It's the same as saying "we are now offering Uber-Expensive Closed App v3.0 on Linux", it's fine for devotees of that app. But, it does nothing for anyone but the company selling the software.
Why is the parent a troll? Because he is telling the truth? IBM make a significant amount of money on their global services division, and much of that is through supporting open source software. IBM also resells other vendors opensource software, weather it's Redhat, or SUSE/Novel. They also resell others proprietary software to run on opensource software of course with support contract in toe. IBM hasn't stoped selling AIX, nor has it open sourced DB2 or *cough cough* WebSphere. Werther you like it or not IBM is not or has never been in the business of altruism. Not that there is anything wrong with making money of of open source software, lets just not pretend it's altruism. If it was truly altrusim wouldn't they prefer a BSD like licences?
It's quite funny really - they've taken the headline, chopped out one word (IBM) and then only quoted from the part of the article that refers to the word that they've removed.
The reference to open source is actually that they are designing their app server to operate more smoothly with open source frameworks like Spring and Hibernate, which in my view is a good thing (although not having really played much with the previous versions, I'm not sure what was preventing this in the first place, so it could just be throwing a few trendy buzzwords arounds).
(declared interest - I used to be a product manager for Oracle)
Oracle used to have one product that made money - a database. Now Oracle Apps is being taken more seriously Oracle has become a one and a half product company. All other Oracle products only exist to support database sales. Many long standing Oracle products have never been directly profitable. I believe Developer, JDeveloper and Designer all fall into this category.
Oracle have always been a reluctant party in the Application Server marketplace. The original OAS was ditched for an Apache based bundle. More support for IBM could be a signal that Oracle are getting ready to pull the plug on OAS altogether. More likely is that the oracle product stack is getting close enough to J2EE compliant that having a proprietary Application Server is considered no longer strategically important.
Pure speculation, but I wonder if Oracle have hit middle tier scalability problems with very large e-business suite deployments. Supporting other Application Servers might be easier than improving OAS for those implementations.
Postgres is a worthy RDBMS in its own right, but it's no Oracle. Of course, a lot of people use Oracle's RDBMS when postgres or MySQL would do just as well, but when you need Oracle, you need Oracle, and postgres (currently) just won't do.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Personally I will watch this and download Oracle (DB) for a play. The environment at work is MS internally, yet I was given free range on the server and we are running Apache + Tomcat. The apps are based on Hibernate and Spring (handles ALL the plumbing that you previously had to do by hand, but that is another subject). Due to the attachment to MS there was a lot of political pressure to buy SQL Server. Yet now my boss is beginning to see the benefits of open-source (now 60-70% Linux), and has openly stated that the purchase of MS-SQL was perhaps a mistake - given alternatives such as Postgres and the fact that I develop using HSQL. Oracle was considered initially, and if it will work easily with our web frontend then it certainly becomes a contender. Particularly as there are absolutely no plans to update MS-SQL 2000 to whatever it is that comes next (2005?). At the end of the day I will be there for another year or so, therefore ongoing support becomes an issue. Widely supported software has its' benefits such as a steady market
of experienced people, and given that I am in Tasmania this is one of the primary concerns.
Their client libraries. So that I can build them on anything "exotic" like OpenBSD/i386 or FreeBSD/amd64...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Sure, they may lose some DB2 deals, but they also stand to gain Websphere deals from many Oracle clients who were using a competing product that they now realize is exposing them to single-sourcing risk. The wiser clients will be looking at the technologies on the horizon and how that will play out in terms of the flexibility they will have in future upgrades. They may be worried that a specific technology will work to lock them in and take away their option to walk away from a future licensing negotiation. Basically, what IBM is saying here is "See, we are willing to leave your options more open than the other solution." ...And what's to say
that some Oracle clients, after moving to Websphere, won't then be
convinced to switch to DB2 if Oracle puts them on the treadmill? So,
from the vendors' perspective it is mostly a wash, and from the
clients' perspective, it leaves room for viable options (possibly Sun
java) or a positioning that allows them to partly (or completely)
switch to open source as a future option.