Oracle Attacks Open Source; Says Community-Developed Code Is Inferior

sfcrazy writes "Oracle has a love-hate relationship with open source technologies. In a whitepaper (PDF) for the Deparment of Defense, Oracle claims that TCO (total cost of ownership) goes up with the use of open source. They're essentially trying to build a case for the use of their own products within the government. 'The skill required to successfully and economically blend source code into a commercially viable product is relatively scarce. It should not be done directly at government expense.' Oracle also attacks the community-based development model, calling it more insecure than company developed products. 'Government-sponsored community development approaches to software creation lack the financial incentives of commercial companies to produce low-defect, well-documented code.'"

Comments

Prejudiced much?

[erroneus]

That is the most insulting demonstration of hubris from Oracle I have seen in a very long time.

Whitepaper?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't we just call them advertisements like the waste of time they truly are?

You got a bit wrong there, Larry...

[ak_hepcat]

You said "Government-sponsored community development approaches to software creation lack the financial incentives of commercial companies to produce low-defect, well-documented code."

What you really meant was "Unlike proprietary, hidden commercial code, Government-sponsored back doors in software can't be found in the traditional, open-source, many-eyes, well-documented code.

But that probably doesn't rake in the profits, does it?

Re:Like your own product

[dyingtolive]

Blatantly, even.

[brad@icarus Desktop]$ cat /etc/oracle-release
Oracle Linux Server release 6.4
[brad@icarus Desktop]$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.4 (Santiago)
[brad@icarus Desktop]$ uname -a
Linux icarus 2.6.39-400.209.1.el6uek.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Sep 10 20:39:39 PDT 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
[brad@icarus Desktop]$

At least CentOS bothered to change the redhat-release file.

Let's see if I've got this.

[thevirtualcat]

Oracle: "We're buying Sun. Next step is to dismantle (MySQL,) close (Solaris, Java,) dissolve (OpenOffice) and generally disrupt all of Sun's open source properties that we can."

Community: "What? You can't do that!"

Oracle: "Watch us!"

Community: "Well, we'll just fork it."

Oracle: "S---! The forks (MariaDB, Percona, OpenIndiana, LibreOffice) and their pre-existing competitors (Linux, FreeBSD, Dalvik) are getting more popular than our versions! READY THE FUD CANNONS!"

Re:Yeah, but they nailed the "documentation" part

[Nadaka]

As opposed to Oracle error codes that are documented as "Please contact Oracle support", for shit they know about and have a patch ready for but they have you over the coals and want to extort a couple hundred grand from you.

Re:Wouldn't Java be a counterexample?

[TopSpin]

wouldn't Java be a example of the contrary to this?

Yes, but not the best one. The best would be Oracle's database. Despite the fact that Oracle Database Server is not the result of a 'community-based development model,' the product has a long, ugly history of vulnerabilities. For some reason it fails to be composed of 'low-defect code,' despite apparently having all the best financial incentives. The list of vulnerabilities is long and grows regularly.

The only reason Oracle Database Server has never been the victim of a SQL Slammer type exploit is that it is so expensive that most instances exist only well behind corporate and government firewalls that, if not well maintained, at least exist. Many SQL Server admins apparently don't believe in firewalls.

However, [Solaris] is more of Sun's creation than Oracle's.

Likewise with Java.

It's a question of business model

[laird]

The question is who you want to pay, and what you want the cost model to be. That is, if it's something with both an FOSS and COTS option.

If you want to pay a vendor a fee, typically based on capacity + professional services, go that way.

If you want to use a FOSS technology, and pay only for professional services, go that way.

Generally I think the FOSS model is much better for customers, because:
1) The customer can scale the business without additional licensing costs.
2) The customer has the flexibility to choose any vendor (or internal staff) to do the work.

So, for example, my last startup grew to 70m users on FOSS software, with hundreds of servers, with only physical server, hosting and bandwidth costs (plus a small dev team, which I would need in any case). If I'd used a licensed OS, database, etc., that cost would have made my business not viable.

Re:Yeah, but they nailed the "documentation" part

[K. S. Kyosuke]

This is about Oracle and well they have PostgresSQL beat by a mile

If you need that mile of bookshelves for people to be able to use your product, something has gone horribly wrong.