Should Oracle Fear Open Source?

There's a good article on Silicon.com "Should Oracle Fear Open Source?"  The analysis on the impact of open source is significant, however, I think the market analysts such as Gartner still have not gotten their heads around the right way to measure open source impact.  It can't be measured in license fees the same way traditional closed source products have been; with open source there is no significant license fees.  In that regard, the estimates are woefully low.  Open source software has been growing far faster and for far longer than the analysts estimate.  At this point, MySQL is in the #3 position of market share (measured as usage) after Oracle and SQL Server and far ahead of DB2, Sybase and others.  It may take another couple of years before the analysts figure out a way to report that.

I think Oracle understands open source better than most people give them credit.  Larry Ellison didn't get to the top of the market by being complacent.  Oracle embraced client/server before many others, made millions and then, more importantly, they walked away. That's right. Ellison declared client server dead in order to move rapidly to the new era of internet computing. 

Oracle has benefited from huge market share growth on Linux; Microsoft is absent from that market and DB2 is pretty marginal.  Now Oracle has put their toe in the open source market through acquisitions of InnoBase and SleepyCat. 

But Oracle is facing a battle on multiple fronts. Not only are they fighting the traditional battle against Microsoft on the low end and DB2 on the high end, now they must also deal with open source infrastructure, including MySQL, JBoss, Geronimo and others.  In the application space, the "Software as a Service" on-demand offerings like Salesforce.com and Rightnow are growing far faster than Oracle's core business or their recent multi-billion dollar acquisitions.  No wonder the SAAS companies are trading at a much higher multiple than Oracle. 

• Silicon: Should Oracle Fear Open Source?
• The Register: Client Server is Dead, Says Oracle Chief

Comments

[Joerg]

my experience is, that many things are going just because of aggressive marketing. OpenSource might be a key word, but in IT-departments reality is that many deals are made through spamming, and this close contact simply is what opensource con't do.

if you want to read my bitter experiences, here's the link: http://oracle-agent.blogspot.com/2006/08/fighting-erp-battle-for-oracle-in.html