Oracle's Android lawsuit - another sign of things to come
-
Oracle's purchase of Sun depicts another ritual dismantling of many great OSS projects. Anyone mildly interested in the growth of the Open Source community should be alarmed.
Consider the recent news of (essentially) the death of OpenSolaris, an arguably small but growing open source unix operating system forked from a real workhorse among unices: http://techie-buzz.com/foss/oracle-has-killed-opensolaris.html
Losing ZFS to Oracle is huge, as ZFS was, in my opinion, one of the big sellers to OpenSolaris. Kiss it goodbye.
But, we're not done. MySQL's InnoDB, which some considered the number one competitor in performance web application RBDMS's on *nix. Too bad.
A little-talked about lightweight and utilitarian BerkeleyDB went to Oracle, used, for example, at Amazon for a slick migration of large volumes of content between farms.
Now, Java and the recent suit by the money-hungry, Open Source killers: http://www.infoworld.com/t/intellectual-property/oracles-android-lawsuit-pandoras-box-serious-evils-359
Lest we forget OpenOffice was Sun's, one of the really useful products to use for interoperability within an Enterprisey Microsoft Office environment. I don't see much of a future for OpenOffice as FOSS, either.
We have Oracle to thank for all of this and, predictably more to come. From a corporate husk based with expensive licensing structures, large consulting contracts, and governmental lock-ins, it's no surprise they're not about advancing technology, but advancing the shareholder's stock price.
Just do a search on "oracle research" - they discuss their great cash cow - school systems lock-in to Oracle products. Compare that to "google research" or "microsoft research".
-
The writer of that Infoworld article is insane. He wants his readers to "vote with their wallets" by moving away from Oracle products to similar products from other vendors. But while this might be fine for a small project run by one or two people, that's not Oracle's typical customer.
In our company's case, our main software platform - used by all our staff and all our clients - is an Oracle product, with over 8 years' worth of customisation by our development team. It interfaces to our data warehouse (4 years of continuous development by the BI team), another Oracle product. It also interfaces to our financials system (guess what? Oracle again); I don't know how much development there is in those interfaces, though. Most of those interfaces use a tool which, while not an Oracle product, is licensed to us through an Oracle OEM licence (because we got it bundled with some of our Oracle software). Long term, this is likely to be replaced by an Oracle tool, though I'm resisting this as much as possible. :)
The likelihood of our company migrating away from Oracle products for [b]any[/b] reason is very small. The likelihood that we would migrate away from Oracle products in order to show our support for the FOSS movement is exactly zero. The reality is that we are integrating more and more of our business processes around Oracle software.
Now, out of all Oracle's customers, how many are likely to even consider moving away from Oracle for a non-business-related reason? Yes, there are alternatives to using Oracle. But moving is not a simple or inexpensive task, so it needs to have a good reason - and "Oracle is destroying the FOSS movement!" is not sufficient, even if true.
Of course, if you're starting out and haven't committed to any system yet, and you care really deeply about the FOSS movement, and the cost-benefit analysis works out to be comparable, and you don't need the "We use Oracle!" cachet for sales, this might inspire you to choose a different system instead. But I don't think that market segment is large enough to cause any sleepless nights at Oracle.
-
It's scary when you think about how difficult it is to avoid Oracle completely and not wind up in the realms of Microsoft.
-
@ammoQ said:
It's scary when you think about how difficult it is to avoid Oracle completely and not wind up in the realms of Microsoft.
Note: This is not necessarily a bad thing. Microsoft's management and development tools all look and act like proffessional grade, commercial projects; their licensing costs are lower overall, more is included with the server softwares (reporting, etc), and Oracles management and development tools look and behave like bad beta's of amateur open source. And boolean fields, and empty strings.
-
@ammoQ said:
If I have to choose, I'm sad to say that I'd rather be under Oracle's clutches than Microsoft.It's scary when you think about how difficult it is to avoid Oracle completely and not wind up in the realms of Microsoft.
At least Oracle lets me run stuff in UNIX/Linux ... MS's coupling with "everything Microsoft" makes for a really ugly ecosystem. If you want to integrate anything in Oracle, you get mostly open standards. If you want to integrate anything in the MS world, be prepared to rip out anything non-MS: switching LDAP for Active Directory's "LDAP", UNIX for Windows, X Java Appserver for IIS, and everything because you dared to choose SQL Server.
Oracle and Sybase, for example, have some kind of LDAP integration, so that your database login will match the LDAP user. SQL Server will only recognize AD users, and even then, logging in must be done from a Windows-toting machine. Yuck.
-
@danixdefcon5 said:
@ammoQ said:
If I have to choose, I'm sad to say that I'd rather be under Oracle's clutches than Microsoft.It's scary when you think about how difficult it is to avoid Oracle completely and not wind up in the realms of Microsoft.
At least Oracle lets me run stuff in UNIX/Linux ... MS's coupling with "everything Microsoft" makes for a really ugly ecosystem. If you want to integrate anything in Oracle, you get mostly open standards. If you want to integrate anything in the MS world, be prepared to rip out anything non-MS: switching LDAP for Active Directory's "LDAP", UNIX for Windows, X Java Appserver for IIS, and everything because you dared to choose SQL Server.
Oracle and Sybase, for example, have some kind of LDAP integration, so that your database login will match the LDAP user. SQL Server will only recognize AD users, and even then, logging in must be done from a Windows-toting machine. Yuck.
Yes, it's easier to run a 100% ms environment. It's also easier to run a 100% linux environment. However your statements are fundamentally incorrect, either through willfull ignorance or malice.
You CAN integrate LDAP with sql server, and you can use sql server authentication as well, to connect. And using freetds (among others) you can set up an odbc connection to connect to the SQL server from Linux.
Take the time to really compare Microsoft Reporting Services and Oracle Reports. Please.
-
@ammoQ said:
It's scary when you think about how difficult it is to avoid Microsoft completely and not wind up in the realms of Oracle or IBM.
FTFY
-
@belgariontheking said:
@ammoQ said:
It's scary when you think about how difficult it is to avoid Microsoft completely and not wind up in the realms of Oracle or IBM.
FTFYIf you put it like this, it's even more scary.
-
@ammoQ said:
@belgariontheking said:
@ammoQ said:
It's scary when you think about how difficult it is to avoid Microsoft completely and not wind up in the realms of Oracle or IBM.
FTFYIf you put it like this, it's even more scary.
Like the recent bug with Eclipse/Java, where changing the vendor name for Java from Sun to Oracle causes eclipse to get all confused and stuff and just CRASH. yay!!
-
@Medezark said:
Like the recent bug with Eclipse/Java, where changing the vendor name for Java from Sun to Oracle causes eclipse to get all confused and stuff and just CRASH. yay!!
That was not a bug, it just had to happen when Eclipse got intelligence, self-awareness and a sense of honor at the same time.
-
If you think Oracle is difficult to compete with, try buying something from them. We've been trying to order a Sun SPARC-based server for weeks, but different Oracle sales types tell us different things; mostly "you can't do that".
-
@MarkJ said:
different Oracle sales types tell us different things; mostly "you can't do that".
Did they at least give you an alternative on how to give them your money or did they just say no can do?
-
@MarkJ said:
If you think Oracle is difficult to compete with, try buying something from them. We've been trying to order a Sun SPARC-based server for weeks, but different Oracle sales types tell us different things; mostly "you can't do that".
That's probably because you're in Maryland and they can't ship the technology out of the United States. . . . . Wait, what?
-
They said to go to one of their value added resellers. The problem is that the resellers are mostly much more expensive...
Last I heard we got them to accept an order.
-
@Medezark said:
@MarkJ said:
If you think Oracle is difficult to compete with, try buying something from them. We've been trying to order a Sun SPARC-based server for weeks, but different Oracle sales types tell us different things; mostly "you can't do that".
That's probably because you're in Maryland and they can't ship the technology out of the United States. . . . . Wait, what?
That's why I live in Maryland and work in Virginia. They have jobs in Virginia...
-
@MarkJ said:
If you think Oracle is difficult to compete with, try buying something from them.
And once you've passed that hurdle, try to install some of their software.
-
@Scarlet Manuka said:
@MarkJ said:
If you think Oracle is difficult to compete with, try buying something from them.
And once you've passed that hurdle, try to install some of their software.
And after that, things are getting ugly.
-
@ammoQ said:
If I ever had to install one of their products. The first thing I'd do is check to see if my company took out a life insurance policy on me.@Scarlet Manuka said:
@MarkJ said:
And once you've passed that hurdle, try to install some of their software.If you think Oracle is difficult to compete with, try buying something from them.
And after that, things are getting ugly.
-
@ammoQ said:
And after that, things are getting ugly.
You... you didn't try to [b]use[/b] it, did you?
