Open-source needs big vendors to thrive, Ellison says

I wonder in what sense Larry Ellison means thrive?

How much better does Linux and open source have to be in order to be considered a thriving success? It's a thriving success in my business right now and is being used more and more in the businesses we serve. It's in my Tivo. It runs the VPS web hosting my son uses for his gaming Wiki. It's rapidly becoming the de-facto standard for embedded use. It's driving a large percentage of the thin-client market. The emerging nations more and more are embracing it as the gift it is for them to take from and contribute to.

I wonder what $1 billion spent on open source in a truly benevolent fashion could create. On the other hand I don't really believe it's necessary or even desirable. I think that kind of spending and mindset leads to over-complicated, over-engineered solutions that supposedly make our lives easier but stay broken way too often. It gives us new desktops crammed down our throats because it's time to feed a company's coffers. It gives us expensive office suites with a whole new UI paradigm to supposedly make workers more productive when virtually every current office works already knows the current paradigm and most user's office suite needs were surpassed long ago.

What I see happening in the next wave of Linux and open source growth is more documentation, more education, clear GUIs, more turn-keyed application stacks, and a continued wave of success stories. That's all happening outside Larry Ellison's world and will happen whether Oracle makes positive contributions or not.