Scary Scenario: Oracle leveraged into dominant OSS position with Sendmail, Apache, Linux, etc.
Oracle has analysts guessing about Oracle's open source intent since it acquired Innobase OY. And regardless of what SleepyCat says today, their CEO had a different perspective back in November: SleepyCat CEO Michael Olson said he believes Oracle's takeover of Innobase, the Finnish developer of InnoDB, a discrete open source transactional database technology that ships with MySQL, is an acknowledgement of the growing importance of open source and of MySQL in particular. Now Olson seems to be singing a different tune. In his blog he wrote: "We're joining Oracle because we believe the opportunity in embedded data management is too big for us to handle on our own". SleepyCat was co-founded by Margo Seltzer in 1996. Selter is the former University of California Berkeley researcher who now teaches at Harvard. SleepyCat lists its headquarters in Lincoln, Massachusetts where and employs 15 people there. Its primary office is in Emeryville, Calif. But that's not as significant as its customers. SleepyCat claims more than 200 million of its databases are used in products from many of the largest high-tech companies in the world, including Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) of San Jose, Calif., EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) of Hopkinton, Mass., and Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) of Mountain View, Calif. It also is a major component of every Linux distributor, all of the BSD products such as FreeBSD, Sendmail, Apache, OpenLDAP, Red Hat's identity server and more. Larry Ellison says the company is taking a more aggressive approach with open source."We are moving aggressively into open source. "We're embracing it, we're not going to fight this trend. We think if we're clever we can make it work to our advantage." One has to now wonder what he means by agressive. We should also wonder about the future. It puts a major piece of drama into play. What will happen - only in the fullness of time will we know. Does anyone remember Steltor? They competed head on with Microsoft Exchange and were bought by Oracle. Where are they now? |
|
Subject | Topic Starter | Replies | Views | Last Post |
---|---|---|---|---|
the road less traveled... | majones | 1 | 1,688 | Feb 15, 2006 3:09 PM |
If it's done, stick a fork in it. | cr | 2 | 1,563 | Feb 15, 2006 12:21 PM |
No need to panic | IGnatiusTFoobar | 1 | 1,572 | Feb 15, 2006 12:01 PM |
License? | crusadingknight | 1 | 1,488 | Feb 15, 2006 10:09 AM |
You cannot post until you login.