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What's the Oracle Trial Against SAP Really About?
Ponca City writes "Chris O'Brien writes in the Merucry News that Larry Ellison's lawsuit against bitter rival SAP gives Ellison the opportunity to deliver the final humiliation to his company's greatest foe of the past decade while sending a blunt message to Oracle's next great enemy, Hewlett-Packard: 'This is who you are fighting. This is how determined we are to win. Get ready.' O'Brien writes that it's a crafty bit of psychological warfare that is already having the desired effect. When Oracle decided to subpoena former SAP CEO Léo Apotheker after he was appointed president and CEO of HP, Apotheker decided to stay out of the country to avoid testifying so now we have the bizarre spectacle of the new CEO of the largest technology company in the world unable to show his face in Silicon Valley. Ellison loves to fight. In gaining control of PeopleSoft, Ellison demonstrated the love of combat and confrontation that has made him one of the wealthiest men on the planet. He waged an 18-month hostile takeover bid to acquire the company, and fought off an effort by the US Department of Justice to torpedo the deal. 'Oracle probably could have settled this case [with SAP],' writes O'Brien. 'But why pass up a glorious chance to subpoena Apotheker and send your new opponent running in circles?'"
While I agree with you on principle, Oracle documentation is second to none and that's better than having to post to some mailing list and then having to send configs along with version dependencies. I would so there are lots of pros and cons of both sides of this. Google is not a great way to get documentation on something specific. Just yesterday I was searching for the cause to one-way communication between an Asterisk 1.4 and an Asterisk 1.6 box that had been upgraded from 1.4 and was using the same config. It took a very long time. Contrast that with virtually any Oracle issue which can be resolved within ten minutes on Metalink or if things really get hairy, within two hours via a support request.
Often times you do get what you pay for even if you have to pay too much to get it. I'll agree most of that should be free and in the interest of adoption of product lines that would actually probably be a smart move from a business standpoint. I look at all the people running away from Sun servers because everything is hidden away now by Oracle so its easy to see that hiding the documentation just makes people look for something more open.
Oracle is in serious trouble these days despite their spending spree, they lack focus and it shows in their product line. I think most people would agree that you only use Oracle for the database, all of their other apps are simply a joke with open source alternatives being very attractive for reporting and collaboration. ERP options still appear to be lacking but the concept as a whole seems to going away anyway. That's probably why Oracle wanted Sun, to have a complete platform for their database completely supported from head to toe the way Apple does it.