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Oracle Boss Says OSS Needs Big Business
Rob writes "Oracle Corp's CEO, Larry Ellison, has maintained that open source projects are only
successful when major technology corporations get involved and doubted that open source
will have a major impact on the software areas in which the company operates. Speaking at
Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo Ellison also confirmed that the company had inquired about
acquiring open source database vendor MySQL AB and denied that Oracle's
recent open source acquisitions were designed to harm its rival."
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the CEO of General Mills has declared that breakfast is only successful when big business gets involved, the Maverick playing cards company has concluded that games of chance are only successful when big business gets involved, and the Louisville Slugger company have announced that bludgeoning people with baseball bats is only a success when big business gets involved.
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IFAIK Gaim doesn't have a corporate sponsor but is an extremely successful OSS project. Corporate sponsorship is a great thing but not a requirement for a great project.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
open source projects are only successful when major technology corporations get involved
Show me the big buisness involvement with qmail. sendmail? how about bind? Does ISC count as a "major technology corporation" now?
I suppose you could also require a definition of successful. Buisness definition of success is money. My definition of success is how many people use it. IRC. Big buisness has generally steered right clear of it. Probably about a million people using it. Is IRC successful? Cause thats one of my open source projects.
What about RFC791. That could be seen as "open source". BSD's socket layer? Definitely open source. Definitely successful, Microsoft used it. I wouldnt say any big buisness made it successful. I would say it was successful beforehand, and big buisness used that success to further its own goals.
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I think Larry's pushing an agenda here. Linux and Apache were both tremendously successful long before the big corporations got involved. They got involved _because_ the Open Source products were successful.
If MySql hadn't established a market niche that's now threatening Oracle, would Larry have looked at buying it? How did he make it successful?
What about standard staples of Java development such as Ant, JUnit, even things like Struts? Sure, most corporations use them. But they're successful because they're written well, they add great value, they're available, and they were all of those things without IBM or Oracle or Microsoft buying them, promoting them, offering to support them, etc.
I think Larry's wrong. Surprisingly often people do just sit at home and write world-class software, and sometimes that does become successful. Open Source definitely doesn't need corporate sponsorship; the two can go together very nicely.
Larry Ellison, has maintained that open source projects are only successful when major technology corporations get involved
That's funny. It seems to me that major technology corporations usually get involved in open source projects only after they become successful.
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