Oracle Boss Says OSS Needs Big Business 157
Rob writes "Oracle Corp's CEO, Larry Ellison, has maintained that open source projects are only
successful when major technology corporations get involved and doubted that open source
will have a major impact on the software areas in which the company operates. Speaking at
Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo Ellison also confirmed that the company had inquired about
acquiring open source database vendor MySQL AB and denied that Oracle's
recent open source acquisitions were designed to harm its rival."
Ignorant comments (Score:4, Informative)
"We have many more developers on Linux than Red Hat," he added, pointing out that the Redwood Shores, California-based company Oracle Cluster File System to enable Linux to scale across enterprise clusters
Man, those are some ignorant ass comments. Oracle is a much bigger company than red hat. It's more interesting to see the percentage of their developers focused on open source. I can pretty much guarantee it's red hat. Red hat needs open source to survive. It's the basis of their whole business model.
Second of all, those three companies did NOT make Linux. IBM has been a very good general purpose contributor, and to a lesser extent Intel. However, Oracle is NOT in that bunch. Oracle's contributions are minor compared to the other two and can be mostly traced back to enhancements that directly benefit their commercial products. Not saying their contributions aren't appreciated, but they are by no means the same league as Intel and IBM. And really, he just spouted out a couple of his butt buddies. There are a lot of small companies that make a particular product based on linux (such as backup solutions) that make extremely important contributions. The only surviving iSCSI implementation on Linux came from a small company making a linux based backup solution. Intel in fact contributed iSCSI code that is now largely depreciated. Open source does need a commercial counterpart, however it's not the 500 pound gorillas that make open source unique. It's the small companies that need it to survive. I can't say the same or Oracle.
Re:No clue on relevance of revenues or who made Li (Score:3, Informative)
Personally, when I see $15G, I think 15 Grand, but that doesn't make sense in this context.