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Oracle Continues Warming Up to Open Source 79

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the the-more-the-merrier dept.
ErikPeterson writes to tell us that News.com is running a story about a partnership between IBM and Oracle. This partnership is to help "ensure that Oracle's packaged applications run natively--that is, without modification or special translators--on the majority of IBM's WebSphere-branded middleware, including its application server and portal, plus Big Blue's recently announced Process Server."
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Oracle Continues Warming Up to Open Source More

Oracle Continues Warming Up to Open Source

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  • Finallly!!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by njcoder ( 657816 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @04:32AM (#13602281)
    Finally, IBM is putting it's money where it's mouth is. "Oracle warming up to open source..." "oracle applications to run on WebSphere" Guess that means IBM is open sourcing WebSphere?? I must have missed that bit of news.

    Yeah I only read the summary.

    • The article begins with: Oracle is warming up to open-source software and IBM's middleware products.

    • Re:Finallly!!!!! (Score:5, Informative)

      by njcoder ( 657816 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @04:45AM (#13602304)
      If anyone missed the sarcastic tone, the point is the summary doesn't reflect the headline. Hell the article headline doesn't reflect the article. There's one small line how Oracle is going to make it easier to integrate Sprinng and Hybernate into their app server. That's the only Open Source bit.

      It shouldn't be a big deal to use Oracle's J2EE applications on WebSphere. Had they written their applications to use only J2EE specified classes/methods/packages there shouldn't be a major problem porting one application to another app server. Unfortunately a lot of App Server vendors write their own extensions to the specification that if used causes this problem. It's good that the vendors are inovating before something even becomes a JSR but it can cause portability problems.

      Oracle's app server hasn't gotten much momentum behind it. Some people may use it if they already are using Oracle and don't care too much about their app server but the App server market leaders are BEA and IBM. Some of the cool features in Oracle RAC depend on an Oracle App server. So if you're commited to a different app server then you're going to have some issues to work with. I think some of their transaction failover stuff depends on OAS.

      What Oracle should do is make modifications to their application so that it's a pure J2EE application that can run on any certified app server. That seems like the better thing to do. Hopefully that's what they do and this is just some PR bullshit with IBM.

      When Oracle announcces they're apps will run on JBoss and any other open source appservers that have been certified then you can say Oracle is warming up to open source.

      • Re:Finallly!!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Adult film producer ( 866485 ) <van@i2pmail.org> on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @05:19AM (#13602372)
        As well, you might say that Microsoft is warming up to Open Source because they included some OSS utilities with VISTA or whatever their latest operating system incarnation is...

      • Re:Finallly!!!!! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @06:56AM (#13602596)
        (declared interest - I used to be a product manager for Oracle)

        Oracle used to have one product that made money - a database. Now Oracle Apps is being taken more seriously Oracle has become a one and a half product company. All other Oracle products only exist to support database sales. Many long standing Oracle products have never been directly profitable. I believe Developer, JDeveloper and Designer all fall into this category.

        Oracle have always been a reluctant party in the Application Server marketplace. The original OAS was ditched for an Apache based bundle. More support for IBM could be a signal that Oracle are getting ready to pull the plug on OAS altogether. More likely is that the oracle product stack is getting close enough to J2EE compliant that having a proprietary Application Server is considered no longer strategically important.

        Pure speculation, but I wonder if Oracle have hit middle tier scalability problems with very large e-business suite deployments. Supporting other Application Servers might be easier than improving OAS for those implementations.

      • I heard a spiel how Oracle Fusion apps will be all standards based, built on open platform. An answer to a question "Will they run under JBoss?" was a quick "No, never! Standards based meant Oracle Application Server!". Now you know.
    • WebSphere is open source: it's called Eclipse.
    • The real open source Oracle contribution is the persistence technology in the reference implementation of Java EE platform 5 [prnewswire.com], under the CDDL. It will be part of Glassfish [java.net] (or "SJSAS" [javaopen.net]).
      • whoop-dee-effing-do, there's skads of persistence libraries out there for java and every other language under the sun, with and without dbms backend. Of course, the real purpose of j2ee and java is to mandate multiple layers of bloated server infrastructure to sell hardware and expensive oracle (which scale in price geometrically with server power) licenses.

  • nothing to do with open source (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @04:33AM (#13602283)
    This has nothing to do with open source, does it ??
    It's just a partnership to assure that oracle will stick to a defined standard ?!?!
  • What, are you blaming Open Source for the Global Warming now?

  • Marketing speak - and 5 years old (Score:5, Informative)

    by gtoomey ( 528943 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @04:47AM (#13602310)
    What on earth has this go to do with open source? If they mean Linux, all this is saying is that Oracle gurantees it runs on Linux but that has been the case for 5 years. I think the editors should read and understand stories before posting.
    • "What on earth has this go to do with open source? If they mean Linux, all this is saying is that Oracle gurantees it runs on Linux but that has been the case for 5 years. I think the editors should read and understand stories before posting."

      Hello pot, meet kettle.

      I guess I can see how you got confused that this was about Linux. I mean just because the story didn't even mention an operating systems, let alone Linux, you were keen to read between the lines and figure out since they mentioned Open Sourc

      • Re:Marketing speak - and 5 years old (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The point is still correct.. All the article is talking about is some vague interoperability with popular free software packages.

        In business terms, this is roughly saying "there are several applications that have become very popular, we will allow people to buy our expensive/closed/restrictively-licensed software to work with those popular applications". Big fucking deal. It's the same as saying "we are now offering Uber-Expensive Closed App v3.0 on Linux", it's fine for devotees of that app. Bu
    • It's quite funny really - they've taken the headline, chopped out one word (IBM) and then only quoted from the part of the article that refers to the word that they've removed.

      The reference to open source is actually that they are designing their app server to operate more smoothly with open source frameworks like Spring and Hibernate, which in my view is a good thing (although not having really played much with the previous versions, I'm not sure what was preventing this in the first place, so it could jus

  • Let's see (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    In the last year, Oracle has swallowed up two major corporations in hostile takeovers to sell proprietary enterprise management (CRM, ERP, etc).

    Larry has a serious ego issue, and cannot accept anybody being better than him (even though in a moral sense 99% of us are, but we're talking monetary here).

    Is Oracle absolved from this immature behavior just because they claim to like Linux?

    The answer is no.

    • Just why is buying corporations "immoral"? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      To take over a company like Oracle did you'd have to convince the current owners to sell it to you. It's only "hostile" as far as the management of the company being taken over is concerned. But since they report to the owners and it's the owners who decided to sell, the management is SOL. Which is probably why they're hostile to the idea.

      Why do you paint owner's selling their company for what they consider a fair price in such negative terms? It sounds like nothing more than knee-jerk anti-big-business

  • Hmm (Score:1, Insightful)

    by ShaolinTiger ( 798138 )
    So now IBM Websphere = Open Source? Haven't heard about that one..

  • Has nothing to do with Open Source... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gopal.V ( 532678 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @04:57AM (#13602326) Homepage Journal

    It's a purely poplularity determined phenomenon. If their customers want it for platform XYZ and Oracle sees big bucks coming from them - they will partner up with Satan himself. People have been telling me that Oracle on Linux will drive migration to Linux. I think that Oracle is just riding on Linux rather than vice versa.

    Ah, all those flame wars on the LUG lists... I'm pretty sure this move doesn't have anything to do with the fact that whatever IBM has is Open Source - just a business decision based on popularity.

    • Re:Has nothing to do with Open Source... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Neil Blender ( 555885 ) <neilblender@gmail.com> on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @05:14AM (#13602358)
      IBM has Open Source - just a business decision based on popularity.

      IBM is heavily investing in life science. A lot of life science, especially at the university level, is using linux. I have been to a number of life science meetings/user groups/etc hosted all or in part by IBM. The minute a rep gets whiff that you are not a decision maker - a buyer, they turn tail on you, immediately. I have seen it happen a number of times (not to me, but I have seen a number of people outright snubbed right in the middle of conversations when they reveal something so horrid as they are a graduate student or post doc.) They don't give two shits about science and they make no bones about showing it. They just want to sell servers.
    • Ditto. Matter of fact - pricing of Oracle products is identical on either platform - Linux or Windows. Not sure about IBM's websphere - whether open source or not - but Oracle is definitely NOT open source. Sybase, Ingres and even Informix I believe have joined the Open Source route on Linux - Oracle is still pricey and closed-source.

      This is not news at all.
    • I'll agree that Oracle is riding on Linux, but I think it was more than a "because it was popular" decision. According to people I've talked to, there were quite a few factors involved. I can safely say that there is at least one case where Oracle's move to use Linux internally has helped a company move to using Linux servers for an Oracle database.

      We had been using Windows boxes for a very busy production OLTP database, and had been looking for a way off. There were a lot of factors involved, but not th

  • IBM = Open Source? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by zaguar ( 881743 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @05:01AM (#13602334)
    Hate to be Captain Obvious, but IBM /= Open Source. Sure, it has made many contributions to OSS, but to say Oracle integration with IBM is a move to support OSS is a logical fallacy.

    This is not a troll. If IBM wants to become an OSS company - they should open up their programs - especially DB2. It is a nightmare to use that in collaboration with Samba, LDAP etc.

    So who do I see as OSS companies? Red Hat and Novell are my 2 big ones.

    • > This is not a troll. If IBM wants to become an OSS company - they should open up their programs -
      > especially DB2. It is a nightmare to use that in collaboration with Samba, LDAP etc.

      Why can't ibm just open up part of its software catalog and still be an oss company? I think over time we'll see it continually releasing software to open source as revenue from those products diminishes.

      And sure, it might be nice to release db2 as open source now - but there are already a handful of good open source

  • Oracle is about profit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CaptainZapp ( 182233 ) * on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @05:07AM (#13602345) Homepage
    And if there's profit to be made then open source is Oracles best friend.

    Oracle is about the last software company having anything to do with altruism; period.

  • Too little too late (Score:1, Informative)

    by Mensa Babe ( 675349 )
    It might have been a good idea in the bad old days [google.com] but today when we already have a stable, production ready, rock solid, ACID [wikipedia.org]-compliant open-source [wikipedia.org] relational [wikipedia.org] database management system of choice [google.com], Oracle will never truly succeed in "warming up to open source". It's the same mistake that the record industry has made in the early nineties all over again. They missed the train. Sad but true.

    • Re:Too little too late (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      wow lots of links not much content. let's see postgreasql has just now managed to be able to do a point in time recovery, I mean within the last year. lets see oracle has been doing this sence the late 80's wow just wow, I'm so fuckin impressed. Tell me when postgresql can do a tablespace point in time recovery, or has a process based backup and recovery suite and then I may give you a bit of credence. And no I'm not saying that postgresql is bad I'm just saying it's /= to oracle.

    • Re:Too little too late (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yes, jolly good if you're going to write a new application from scratch. In the meantime, the rest of us maintaining software based round proprietary Oracle code, aren't going to get business backing to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds migrating onto a free piece of software - at least not unless the benefit exceeds the cost.
      Of course, this means we are all doomed.

           
    • Database system != application server. Besides, the Oracle RBMS has been available for Linux since '98.

    • Re:Too little too late (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Tim C ( 15259 )
      Postgres is a worthy RDBMS in its own right, but it's no Oracle. Of course, a lot of people use Oracle's RDBMS when postgres or MySQL would do just as well, but when you need Oracle, you need Oracle, and postgres (currently) just won't do.
      • but the number of places where "when you need Oracle, you need Oracle" is rapidly dwindling.

        Features added recently or upcoming in 8.1 (now in beta2) include

        - transaction savepoints
        - point-in-time recovery
        - tablespaces
        - bitmapped indexes (actually a better implementation than Oracle's)
        - java stored procedures (of course, postgresql has long had perl, python, tcl, etc. SPs)
        - replication

        Add in that PostgreSQL's core engine has long been about 5x faster than Oracle's (not to mention orders of magnitude easier
        • > Add in that PostgreSQL's core engine has long been about 5x faster than Oracle's (not to mention orders
          > of magnitude easier to set up and administer) and basically the only reason left to go with Oracle is
          > their clustering. No doubt there are places that need that, but it's a pretty small niche.

          It's not that small a niche anymore: the need to query vast amounts of information has changed from a specialization within data warehousing to a commonplace requirement that a significant minority of
    • Your a fool if you think that postgres can replace Oracle. Most large organizations are never going to trust something without a service agreement. Plus Oracle provides application hosting options as well, and many companies would have to recode all these apps to work with a new platform if they migrate away. By the way I know Oracle Forms/Web Forms suck, but that doesn't mean they aren't used.
  • To the author:

    Are you drunk [voresoel.dk]?

    What exactly is open source in your submission?

    Yes, the News article carries the same stupid headline, but since you decided to shamelessly copy it, you should have made sure you don't submit shit.

    Not only these two apps have aren't OSS, but in most cases they will ultimately run on proprietary OS like AIX and Windows.

    The only OSS-related part in TFA is: Release 3 of its application server will be designed to more smoothly operate with third-party products, including op

  • A better summary for readers (Score:3, Informative)

    by standards ( 461431 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @07:13AM (#13602645)
    - Oracle plans to be chummy with IBM products.
    - There is a passing mention of Apache and Hibernate.
    - Not worth reading unless you have a strong fetish for IBM and Oracle.
  • Considering who we're talking about here, isn't the proper term "thawing"?

  • Has benefits possibly (Score:4, Interesting)

    by NotAgent86 ( 888079 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2005 @08:09AM (#13602789)
    Personally I will watch this and download Oracle (DB) for a play. The environment at work is MS internally, yet I was given free range on the server and we are running Apache + Tomcat. The apps are based on Hibernate and Spring (handles ALL the plumbing that you previously had to do by hand, but that is another subject). Due to the attachment to MS there was a lot of political pressure to buy SQL Server. Yet now my boss is beginning to see the benefits of open-source (now 60-70% Linux), and has openly stated that the purchase of MS-SQL was perhaps a mistake - given alternatives such as Postgres and the fact that I develop using HSQL. Oracle was considered initially, and if it will work easily with our web frontend then it certainly becomes a contender. Particularly as there are absolutely no plans to update MS-SQL 2000 to whatever it is that comes next (2005?). At the end of the day I will be there for another year or so, therefore ongoing support becomes an issue. Widely supported software has its' benefits such as a steady market
    of experienced people, and given that I am in Tasmania this is one of the primary concerns.
  • We know how all charming, friendly, and compassionate computer industry big whigs are. Aren't those the first qualities you think of when you see Larry Ellison, Scot MacNeally, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates? Ooh, I can feel the love radiating off of them now!

    If buying a Mercedes-Benz were like buying Oracle, they'd sell you a big crate of parts and tell you to put it together. Oracle and Java may be powerful, but the learning curve is just atrocious. I'll stick with LAMPPP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, a
  • "...plus Big Blue's recently announced Process Server."

    process-server

    n : someone who personally delivers a process (a writ compelling attendance in court) or court papers to the defendant
  • I find it interesting that IBM is making it easier for Oracle's IAS to work with IBM's WebSphere, since that will by extension make it easier for Oracle to sell their own db into the whole package. Won't this ultimately hurt sales of IBM's DB2, or is IBM finally capitulating to the Oracle Overlord?

    • that will by extension make it easier for Oracle to sell their own db into the whole package

      Sure, they may lose some DB2 deals, but they also stand to gain Websphere deals from many Oracle clients who were using a competing product that they now realize is exposing them to single-sourcing risk. The wiser clients will be looking at the technologies on the horizon and how that will play out in terms of the flexibility they will have in future upgrades. They may be worried that a specific technology

  • Their client libraries. So that I can build them on anything "exotic" like OpenBSD/i386 or FreeBSD/amd64...

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