甲骨文正在计划吃下开源世界
作者： RT
责任编辑： 阚智
来源： 《电脑商情报》
时间： 2006-02-13 09:14
Gotta hand it to our ace of development, Darryl Taft&when on Monday he blogged about Oracle going shopping for a few other open-source companies to stuff into its shopping bag next to JBoss, he already had a lead on what BusinessWeek is confirming in this story: Namely, both PHP player Zend and popular open-source database maker Sleepycat are slated to go down Oracle’s gullet.
BusinessWeek’s Sarah Lacy writes that sources told her Oracle is in fact planning to buy open-source technology en masse in order to shift away from its $16 billion annual software revenues and onto a subscriber-based model, making money from support and maintenance.
Representatives at Oracle and Sleepycat wouldn’t comment on the speculation, and JBoss hasn’t yet returned phone calls.
With this much buzz in the air, it would be extremely surprising if Oracle weren’t up to something. A little bird told me that the source of the rumors could well be one particular company that invests in both Zend and JBoss, but I’ll get back to you on that one. Talking them up to increase valuation would be a cute trick, at any rate.
At any rate, as Taft wrote on Monday, he’s heard that Oracle is likely planning to scoop up Zend, which stewards the PHP language and with which Oracle is already pretty tight.
While plenty of people are classifying the move into open-source as something that would be of revolutionary nature for Oracle, others say it’s old hat for Oracle.
As Stacey Quandt at Aberdeen Group pointed out to me, Oracle already understands quite well how to leverage the benefits of open source with proprietary technology. Oracle already supports the Apache Web server, partners with Zend, and contributes to the development of the Linux operating system. It also open sourced the Oracle cluster file system for Linux. “So this would not be a ‘change of heart’ for Oracle, as some industry pundits claim,” she said.
Quandt also pointed out that when Oracle launched its Application Server it switched to using the Apache open-source server, as well.
The point is, Oracle has done it where there’s a cost benefit. For instance, with cluster file system, keeping it proprietary wasn’t relevant to revenue. Open-sourcing it brought Oracle a wider community, potentially.
As Quandt points out, the real thrust of these potential buys is what it will do for Oracle in the midmarket. JBoss could well enable that, with its impressive representation in that segment. Whereas it got into the market by offering a version of application server that wasn’t as full-featured as that of Oracle’s, it’s branching out with more functionality and already has the installed base.
BusinessWeek makes a great case of why the buys would be good defensive moves for Oracle. As it now stands, Oracle is the only company that sells databases, applications and middleware for large companies. What’s standing in the way of IBM getting into the applications business, or SAP getting into the database business, particularly given a) IBM’s recent purchase of Gluecode, showing that it’s also on the open-source prowl, and b) that there are open-source components that can be had at comparatively low prices that could fill out the stack of offerings from Oracle’s biggest competitors?
From the BusinessWeek article: “As open-source versions of all of these technologies gain steam, the last thing Ellison & Co. want is another major software vendor to cobble together comparable depth.”
But as BusinessWeek points out, if Oracle does buy these companies, its’ going to get a “customer base that’s largely getting a free ride.”
Would that customer base head out the door after an Oracle buy? Pundits still traumatized by the ugly PeopleSoft buy like to suggest they would, but that’s ignoring both Oracle’s substantial experience with open source to date and the fact that, believe it or not, Oracle is actually handling its PeopleSoft acquisition pretty much the way it said it would&absorbing the technology and working to incorporate it and make it better, rather than pulverizing its once-rival just to wipe it off the face of the planet.
But, given this widespread impression of Oracle, maybe the pundits are right-on. Maybe the open-source community would in fact panic if the software behemoth swallowed some of their favorite tools. But then, where exactly would there be left to go after Zend and JBoss?
As far as Sleepycat goes, I’m as close to positive as I can get that they’ve been working on creating an alternative transaction engine to replace InnoDB after Oracle bought that out from under MySQL’s nose.
This would sure be a monkey wrench in that plan.
BusinessWeek’s Sarah Lacy writes that sources told her Oracle is in fact planning to buy open-source technology en masse in order to shift away from its $16 billion annual software revenues and onto a subscriber-based model, making money from support and maintenance.
Representatives at Oracle and Sleepycat wouldn’t comment on the speculation, and JBoss hasn’t yet returned phone calls.
With this much buzz in the air, it would be extremely surprising if Oracle weren’t up to something. A little bird told me that the source of the rumors could well be one particular company that invests in both Zend and JBoss, but I’ll get back to you on that one. Talking them up to increase valuation would be a cute trick, at any rate.
At any rate, as Taft wrote on Monday, he’s heard that Oracle is likely planning to scoop up Zend, which stewards the PHP language and with which Oracle is already pretty tight.
While plenty of people are classifying the move into open-source as something that would be of revolutionary nature for Oracle, others say it’s old hat for Oracle.
As Stacey Quandt at Aberdeen Group pointed out to me, Oracle already understands quite well how to leverage the benefits of open source with proprietary technology. Oracle already supports the Apache Web server, partners with Zend, and contributes to the development of the Linux operating system. It also open sourced the Oracle cluster file system for Linux. “So this would not be a ‘change of heart’ for Oracle, as some industry pundits claim,” she said.
Quandt also pointed out that when Oracle launched its Application Server it switched to using the Apache open-source server, as well.
The point is, Oracle has done it where there’s a cost benefit. For instance, with cluster file system, keeping it proprietary wasn’t relevant to revenue. Open-sourcing it brought Oracle a wider community, potentially.
As Quandt points out, the real thrust of these potential buys is what it will do for Oracle in the midmarket. JBoss could well enable that, with its impressive representation in that segment. Whereas it got into the market by offering a version of application server that wasn’t as full-featured as that of Oracle’s, it’s branching out with more functionality and already has the installed base.
BusinessWeek makes a great case of why the buys would be good defensive moves for Oracle. As it now stands, Oracle is the only company that sells databases, applications and middleware for large companies. What’s standing in the way of IBM getting into the applications business, or SAP getting into the database business, particularly given a) IBM’s recent purchase of Gluecode, showing that it’s also on the open-source prowl, and b) that there are open-source components that can be had at comparatively low prices that could fill out the stack of offerings from Oracle’s biggest competitors?
From the BusinessWeek article: “As open-source versions of all of these technologies gain steam, the last thing Ellison & Co. want is another major software vendor to cobble together comparable depth.”
But as BusinessWeek points out, if Oracle does buy these companies, its’ going to get a “customer base that’s largely getting a free ride.”
Would that customer base head out the door after an Oracle buy? Pundits still traumatized by the ugly PeopleSoft buy like to suggest they would, but that’s ignoring both Oracle’s substantial experience with open source to date and the fact that, believe it or not, Oracle is actually handling its PeopleSoft acquisition pretty much the way it said it would&absorbing the technology and working to incorporate it and make it better, rather than pulverizing its once-rival just to wipe it off the face of the planet.
But, given this widespread impression of Oracle, maybe the pundits are right-on. Maybe the open-source community would in fact panic if the software behemoth swallowed some of their favorite tools. But then, where exactly would there be left to go after Zend and JBoss?
As far as Sleepycat goes, I’m as close to positive as I can get that they’ve been working on creating an alternative transaction engine to replace InnoDB after Oracle bought that out from under MySQL’s nose.
This would sure be a monkey wrench in that plan.
