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Oracle Japan Pushing Linux Business, Targets NT
bigengineer writes "As the subject says, according to this story, Oracle Japan wants their customers to migrate to linux. I don't think they need much encouragment. " Many of the standard reasons why, as an Oracle rep states: "Many NT users have trouble with NT operations" and "Some users complain about NT's poor performance in data
analysis and some say they need to reboot the operating system regularly. " What's equally interesting is the number of companies Oracle Japan will partner with to provide the support. Linux support is getting to be big business.
That Oracle is bringing out all of their software on the Linux platform is interesting news. But that wasn't the topic of this article. This article simply says that one reseller in Japan is moving to Linux, and that Oracle is going to try to persuade more resellers to distribute Oracle/Linux to their customers.
My point is that small resellers in Japan are even less significant in The Grand Scheme of Things(tm) than small resellers are here in the U.S. Given Oracle's pricing practices, I think it is a fair question to ask if this means that Oracle is backing Linux in a big way--or if Oracle is writing off small customers, steering them to resellers (and Linux) for installation and support.
IMHO, this article is a whole lot more PR than news.
"Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot."
I did take notice at one time TurboLinux was out selling Win98 upgrade. It was not hard to see that Japan was more Linux ready. Japan with a stock market in the dumps for years I am sure is looking for an edge as it is they who would most likely seek a bargain. Japan would not have native loyalty to MS being a company that is not Japanese( there are some who take pride in MS being from the US, eek!). Oracle also is a company that has no OS of its own and has little to fear and perhaps somthing to gain by having Linux emerge on the scene. Linux is neutral territory not the OS of one of its rivals. At this time Oracle in Japan seems par for the course and is a delightful entre' on the Linux menu.
If current pattern holds Linux will continue to grow faster and faster, just for all the companies jumping on the bandwagon. What's really going to help is all the apps that're helping make the transition from Windows to Linux as easy as posible. Projects like wine and this one I found from VMware should continue that growth "software that runs multiple virtual computers on a single PC--at the same time-- without partitioning or rebooting." They have versions of there SW available for both linux and Windows NT & 2000.. Check it out at www.vmware.com complete with a 30 day evaluation version.
NT is a base development platform for the Oracle database
Well, easy, wait till the first 10 Supercomputers of the world, the nasa saturn mission, the superpowers icbms, ibm's and sun's enterprise machines and every SAP-installation around is on linux ;-). ;-).
Then tell the people "If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for you, too."
I expect this to work better than the other way around, which microsoft tries
I work on a company where we have been using NT for 3 years, we have only one file server at the network running NT 4.0 SP5 We *never* have problems with it and it's very uncommon to restart that box, I must admit we have to disconnect some users from the shares because some client-side application leaves unwanted locked files on it. It does a hard work since there are 80 workstations using it 6 days a week, 18 hours a day and all the users are forced to use that server for storing all the work they do (9gb total) so, what's that all about NT crashing that often? I hear that all the time but personally never had such experience on a well cofigured nt running a descent hardware. I'm not saying NT is as solid as a linux. But it can be really stable enough for file sharing. I'm not an NT lover, actually we have 3 linux servers and just 2 NT's and we are about to migrate both of them to linux soon, beacuse they are way better in performance. don't blame the NT that much, check your hardware first and then fine tune the OS.
There are no servers. There are no desktops. There are only computers, networks, and programs. If the computer is on the net, and you can talk to it, then that doesn't mean it's a server. If it can talk to you, that doesn't mean you're a client.
Throw off the shackles of Microsoft's feudal system of lords and serfs. Start thinking about a free world of equal peers.
And for strike three, we have this whole "PC" == "personal computer" silliness.Sigh. Maybe Babelfish should offer a Microsoft-to-hacker translation service, and Slashdot can provide a link.
"Still"? Hello?The answer is never. Never ever ever ever ever. I never did, and I never will. In two decades of computer use, I have not once had an MS-damaged computer. I've never touched the stuff, and neither have most of my programmer friends.
We are the masters of our own computers, independent wayfarers without enslaving ties to the local master, Lord Bill. To him we pay no taxes, nor from him do we hope for rescue in our hour of darkness. We grow our own food, defend our own homes, write our own tales, seek our own solutions. We are freemen, not serfs.
What concerns me most, however, is view points like: "Linux support is getting to be big business."
When publicly traded companys (with a responsibility to there share holders) are forced to choose between a consulting/support 'revenue stream' (ack!) and lowering bariers to development, I'm afraid they'll choose the former.
Imagine, if you will, General Motors relasing a car with 'OpenDash 1.0.0'. Upon entering the car, you notice that the numbers on the speedometer are encrypted, the ignition key goes in the CD player, and the gear shifter is on the rear view mirror. This is an example of a design that is functional, but designed to foster factory support.
Imagine, if you will, a distro/support company releasing source code for a 'Must Have' app and finding no comments in the source code, data structures thought up by a chimp on acid, and a layout that only the bravest of coders could handle. This is an example of a design that is functional, but designed to foster factory support.
It's my hope that distro/support companies will balance support revenue streams with encouraging development and clean code.
But does this mean that NT is a lousy operating system
OR
that Oracle on NT is a lousy port?
I take Larry Ellison telling me not to use NT with about as much salt as I take Scott Mcnealy telling me not to use NT: about 2 lbs of salt!
;-)
As a proof (or rather, vague indication) of this, perhaps we could do a poll here on /. on how many people still dual-boots to Windows. I think I can almost predict the results..
I used to dual-boot Windows until one day I accidently told lilo to place 600K of linux kernel smack on top of the windows 98 root directory. I was on the road, and wouldn't you know it I had the OEM re-install disk, but no magic number to type into the product authorization screen. Faced with the option of (1) humiliating myself by calling M$'s 1-800-RULEGIT (I didn't make that up) or (2) finally installing on Linux and learning to use the remaining packages that Windows was still hanging around on my hard disk for - I bit the bullet and did what I had to do.
Well, it turns out that it was just my imagination that I ever needed Windows. I haven't run Windows once in the last 2 months, and It feels good.
Sure, there are still a few rough spots, especially in the apps. But it gets easier every month. My wife is now a linux user too - she's really not very computer-literate and she doesn't have trouble.
The time has come when we can realistically lose those dual-boots. Hey, freeing up 2 more gig for linux apps is really useful.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
I'm not sure why your company would want to move to Oracle.
Sybase on Linux rocks. Of course Sybase doesn't have the scalability or options that Oracle does, but for mid-ranged databases and even small enterprise databases Sybase can't be beat.
Good. There have to be *some* people left running NT, otherwise whatever would we talk about here? ;-)
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Suppose the 'bravest of coders' untangle the mess and reimplement in clean GPL or BSD licensed code? Buggy software and draconian licensing schemes are already proving to be intolerable when an alternative exists. Why should the market tolerate code designed to cost money simply to maintain it in a sane fashion?
Of course Microsoft doesn't fix such user-discovered bugs. To do so would require a maintenance section of a size that would utterly dwarf their current one (which would be hugely expensive but they could probably just about afford it) hooked into such an astronomically gigantic, world-wide, all-embracing end-user support organization (at a totally unimaginable cost) that it would make the corporation entirely unviable. Support is extraordinarily expensive even in conventional quantities, and here we're not talking conventional.
Microsoft is rich merely because they have never provided customer support in the same order of magnitude as the size of their end-user population. Indeed, there aren't enough techies on the planet for them to do this even if they employed every single one, IMO, and this is also why it's virtually unheard-of to run into anyone that has successfully managed to contact their helpdesk (in UK circles, at least). Ask any large traditional software manufacturer (ie. not free or open-source) which their single largest expenditure is if you don't believe me, and then extrapolate to Microsoft proportions taking into account the number of their products.
The really weird thing though is that people have accepted the situation as the norm now, despite the fact that they wouldn't dream of letting any other manufacturer off the hook in this way. Most odd.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
You are indeed lucky that your NT machines don't crash regularly, but while it might be unusual, I wouldn't consider it isolated.
... but NT has had a strong presence in the mid-range and workgroup database server market ... a these are the databases that power 90% of the e-commerce sites out there.
It is true that NT can be stable, particularly if your NT server serves a single function and has just the right hardware and just the right software.
In reality, any server crash is a serious problem, revealing a flaw with the operating system. My real problem with NT isn't the fact that it is unstable in a large number of situations (especially in dual-use situations), but rather that when it is unstable, it is rather consistently unstable.
If your operating system crashes once a day or once a week, you would think that Microsoft would be able to reproduce the problem and fix it. All operating systems have bugs, and as long as a vendor fixes them, fine, I'm happy. But Microsoft DOESN'T fix them, and a machine that is moderately unstable usually becomes MORE unstable when I apply service packs 1, 2, or 6.
Back to Oracle. The enterprise database market is certainly an important one, but to face reality, neither NT nor Linux is going to displace Solaris anytime soon
NT may be stable as a file system, but I have yet to see a NT machine that can run a real database, run a real webserver, and stay up for more than a week.
Kudos to Oracle for supporting Linux, the ideal operating system for the tens of thousands of e-commerce sites popping up that need a good (but not enterprise class) database and a web server, and need 100% uptimes.
Can you please elaborate?
Why must the support costs be higher ? Is there any evidence to back up this assertion ?
Perhaps it is offset by not paying major $$$s for the NT licenses...
From what I understood in the artical Oracle wasn't just providing technical support for Oracle on Linux but providing technical support for both Oracle and Linux it'self. That can't come cheap.
Having never bought Oracle I don't know much about the WinNT tech support. Depending on how bad the problems with WinNT are and the support agreements it could be much cheaper or much more expensive to support WinNT. Cheaper if WinNT isn't that bad and they don't support WinNT it'self. More expensive if WinNT is bad and causes lots of problems.
It seems that running a limited set of programs or servers would reduce the chance of crashing. The can of worms is contained :)
I predict that very soon running Windows NT will become a bad habit. I don't like that fact that Linux users (call the loosers) are on a witch hunt. Windows NT like OS/2 has its place in the enterprise. Accept it!
1. Their linux support is new. New hires, new manuals, new software. Expensive stuff for any OS.
2. NT techs are common and plentiful. The NT version of Oracle has been around a while, and they already have an existing NT support structure.
Despite the high startup costs, retep points out that Oracle, has determined that linux will still be more cost efective supporting a creaky NT. Plus they probably like not having NT's problems give Oracle a bad name.
We've reached the stage where, while this news is good, it's no longer earth-shattering. We expect this sort of announcement. It's going to become the norm as more and more people get sick of rebooting every day.
So I guess for now the only thing to do is... gloat.
Bwahahahahahaha!
I'd been hearing that Oracle on linux wasn't quite ready for big time yet... Has this changed - is it pretty stable now?
Anyone using it commercially care to comment?
I do like reading these articles, every day more and more companies are starting to use Linux, and with a big company like Oracle pushing it, hopefully they'll also start making it better, like Corel did with Wine. Maybe Oracle could work on SMP and RAID, cos they're a corporation who can afford 8 processor systems to do the testing and development on.
But who knows what will happen, but I think it can only be for the good.
Iain
This is good news for me, especially if Oracle does the same thing in the US. While the place that I work currently is a Sybase shop, we are being told by our corporate headquarters that we will eventually have to move everything to Oracle. Corporate is also already using Linux, so this should make it easier to get Linux into our local shop.
I converted my last dual boot to completely Linux at least a year ago when I ran out of disk space on my primary partition. I don't miss it one bit. Yes there I times when I have to use WinBlows now and then but these days that's what VMware is for. Also a big thanks to Loki Games for releasing Railroad Tycoon and Civ CTP, both of which I recently purchased. Here's to games on Linux!
It's one thing to make a port to Linux, it's another thing to encourage your customers to move to Linux. This is quite a breakthough...
You have to wonder how did Oracle ever convince themselves that converting customers to Linux would be cost effective. The costs of providing the technical support for Linux must be high, higher then the costs of providing WinNT support. This isn't good news for WinNT.
This is great news for Linux... unfortunately, as somebody has already pointed out, we've basically reached a state where this kind of news is expected, and to be expected to become more frequent as Linux-awareness rises.
However, this particular incident only shows that Linux is doing well in the server market. NT never managed to be very successful in the server market anyway, though MS has been trying its best to promote it, so it's not that surprising people are beginning to switch from NT to Linux. But what about the desktop market??? It seems that MS still holds the reins in the PC market, and Linux is only barely making its entry there. Yes, we have all those nice companies going Open Source, doing neat stuff like Corel Linux, selling Linux-preinstalled machines and whatnot, but the cold hard fact is that Windows still rules the PC market. AFAIK we haven't heard that much about Linux making an impact in the PC market; most of the big news is in the server domain.
As a proof (or rather, vague indication) of this, perhaps we could do a poll here on /. on how many people still dual-boots to Windows. I think I can almost predict the results...
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
your box is most likely stable because it is only a simple fileserver.
:P
:)
install a web server, sql server or proxy server on it and see how it fares...
i hate it. i had to go on site *4* (yep, count em) times yesterday because a particular client's machine kept dropping its connection, and of course MS-DNS server that they were using does not recover.. ever. ended up just disabling DNS on that machine.. was just running it as a cache.. its clients were using socks anyway..
ms proxy often has to be restarted, sometimes it locks up solid and you have to reboot the box... administrator logged in, try to kill it "sorry permission denied". wtf?
smash (i hate it, i hate it i hate it...)
ps.. i work in an isp. we do not personally use NT for anything important, other than firewalled office print/file server... our ISP network is 75% linux, 25% solaris
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I work as a network administrator, and I had 3 NT 4.0 Enterprise servers doing file and print services sitting in my office (its more like a big room, but its mine). Everyday the second server (FP_23) in the line would crash. You could set your watch to this peice of crap. One day I stayed after work for 3 hours and installed linux and samba on it (I backed up all the data before). I configured all the services and set it up to look exactly like the old NT box. The next morning when I came back to work, it was still up.... a miracle.
I have been using linux / samba on that server for 2 months now and no one has noticed anything.
Anyway... all I'm saying is that companies don't know how streamless and unnoticable the difference is between a *nix box with samba, and an NT box when its doing file and printing services. Its especially cheaper if you are running linux. You could also save money on newer hardware since I found that samba boxes are alot faster than NT.
That's an interesting new position. Kitchen table, backseat of a car... now your computer desk. Neat.
Before anybody reads too much into this, read all of the article--especially the last paragraph. How many Oracle development partners are there moving customers to Linux?
One.
So maybe it isn't time for the party hats and noisemakers quite yet. You have to understand the context of this kind of announcement: third-party software vendors in Japan aren't a major force. Companies tend to be highly integrated--they do their own IT work. If they outsource work, they'll outsource it to a major company (typically a major American company--Americans are viewed as being the most technologically advanced by the Japanese). The people hiring the one Oracle Linux partner (and the two others to sign up shortly) are teensy businesses.
When Sumitomo, Mitsubishi, NEC, Matsushita, or Toyota embrace Oracle on Linux then you can get (and should be) impressed.
Dual-boot to Windows? No, I've actually never done that. I think my computer at the house still has boot manager on it and will dual-boot OS/2, but not Windows. My computer at my day job runs Windows-95 and only Windows-95, (it's a Compaq Presario) but I've got an X server and CRT running on it, and four or so servers on which I to play Quake, so why would I need to dual-boot?
This is very nice ... in much of the market Oracle is the default choice of DB these days for heavy duty applications ... as such increased Linux support by Oracle is a key inidicator that that Linux will continue to grow in the server market ... for the most part, this is probably at the expense of NT ...
...
On a side note: Does anybody know if Oracle contributes any code (or actually, any projects like raw device DB access or other stuff)? I'm assuming they're at least contributing bug fixes but I'm hoping it's more (I just don't know). They have a lot of know-how and could potentially contribute some really cool stuff
Ah, Larry! He a) worships Japan, b) hates Microsoft with a passion, and c) runs Oracle. He must have been WAITING for this....
teleny, friend of cats.
Well, I must second John Murdoch's post. :) makes `horizontal' barrier.
Normally, when a collar is employed, he enters a
clan and everything is the matter of honour. I
can barely imagine someone at IT dept. who had
approved NT over UNIX 10 years ago now is taking
his word back and adopting Linux, even if it comes
from Whatever-Gaijin Japan. Loosing his face.... Impossiburu....
This makes a `vertical' barrier. Also, clans are allied with some clans and
fighting with others. Allies' ablilty to adopt the said innovation
Of course, it can be impressive from the tech's point of view, but I suspect that Oracle is just getting its press.... Let's see if Big Boys jump in the game....
KuroiNeko