On his blog, Jeff Nolan had a humorous photo from Oracle Open World conference this week. I've seen some other variations out on Flickr (which as most people probably know is built on the open source LAMP stack and MySQL.)
After months of rumors, Oracle's finally come clean on their Linux strategy. It's not Debian, it's not Ubuntu, but rather, is based on Red Hat Linux. Its good to see Oracle take an aggressive stand supporting Linux. Oracle has done a lot of good to support the development and popularization of Linux. But I can't help but wonder if Oracle believes so much in open source, why only for the operating system? Why not the rest of the stack also? (And does this mean that Oracle will support MySQL as part of its support for Red Hat? Cool!)
If Oracle gets even more aggressive in promoting Linux I think that will just hasten the adoption of open source further up the stack. A couple of years ago, I bet that all the major databases would be open source within 10 years. This is another step in the right direction.
Update: I've added a few additional links offering further analysis of Oracle's announcements
- Venture Chronicles: Open World Takes Over SF
- CNet: Oracle to Offer Red Hat Support
- Oracle: Announces Support for Linux
- eWeek: Oy, Again with the Oracle Linux Rumor
- ZDNet: Ellison's Red Hat Hijacking Maneuver
- InfoWorld: With Friends Like These...
Well Oracle will take it one step at a time. Right now they are transforming to software-as-a-service. From there its a much smaller step towards OSS.
Posted by: Lukas | October 25, 2006 at 04:53 PM
I think Oracle is smart enough to recognize that there is just such a transformation happening. That's why it makes sense for Oracle to embrace open source. But I think Oracle's customers are already ahead of the curve figuring out that what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
--Zack
Posted by: Zack Urlocker | October 25, 2006 at 10:54 PM
Yeah. The good thing for Oracle is that there is sufficient market growth, that as long as they prepare themselves for the future, they are not going to hurt all that much. MySQL seems to grow nicely especially in the Web 2.0 market as well.
Its going to be interesting how SAP customers embrace (or not embrace) MySQL once it is SAP certified.
Personally I think the embedded market is another key area. The Sleepycat acquisition was a really good move in that respect. Application developers will really start to move towards bundling SQL engines. Not sure if appliances like IceBreaker are the way to go though. Anyways languages (first PHP, now Java) are also starting to bundle entire SQL engines.
It seems like the future for SQL RDBMS is pretty bright, especially if like DB2 Viper they manage to bridge the XML world efficiently.
Posted by: Lukas | October 26, 2006 at 01:15 AM