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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."
(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.
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.