Oracle & Open Source: Gazing at the Crystal Ball
by Andy Duncan04/18/2001
But now, as we enter the twenty-first century, the writing is already on the wall: This corporate future is much less certain. Despite their enormous bank balances, powerful congressional lobbying teams, and employment of many of the best software gurus, the recent stock crashes have shown that even their cast-iron, money-making methods can become brittle, snap, and be replaced by more successful alloys.
Whatever you think of open source software, you have to acknowledge that Linux has ruined the Windows NT party; that Apache has spoiled the IIS and Netscape server games; and that Perl, Python, PHP, and Tcl have made Java far more free and less lucrative than it otherwise would have been.
How did this happen? Why did these open source technologies spring up at the very time that their proponents could have made their own billions by playing the commercial game? And what about the future? On the other side of the current economic downturn, is it possible that these open source technologies will transform what remains of today's most successful corporations into simple commodity hardware suppliers and over bloated telecom operatives?
In our new book, Oracle & Open Source, Sean Hull and I have tried to answer the first of these questions, particularly in relation to Oracle. You can read Chapter 1, Oracle Meets Open Source online. That chapter contains many links to the tools and applications we cover in the rest of the book.
In Oracle & Open Source, we concentrate on: Where to get today's open source base technologies and application tools; how to install them; how to connect them to Oracle; and how to modify them, should you wish to do so, to suit your own requirements. We cover nearly a hundred separate applications, based mainly upon the core open source bases of Perl, Python, Tcl, Apache, and Linux (with even some of the more open aspects of Java). Writing this book was an exciting Carl Saganesque-like tour through an uncharted software cosmos. We hope you like reading the book as much as we enjoyed writing it.
What about the second question: Where do we go from here? In Oracle & Open Source, we didn't try to address the future of open source, particularly in terms of its relationship to commercial software. We decided that any possible answers would be largely subjective, speculative, and probably not deserving of a place in a book paid for with hard-earned cash. However, even though crystal-ball gazing may not have a place in a book that focuses on the past and present, I thought it might be interesting to gaze just a bit in this article.
To put my pontification in an historical context, let's take a look at the time of the Italian Renaissance. Back then, the spectacularly wealthy Cosimo de' Medici oversaw the most affluent period of Florence's Tuscan history, when his family dominated the banking world of Europe. (It is said that the family originally came from an obscure background of alchemy and medicine.) The Medicis gained several Popes and even two queens of France along the way.
From equally obscure backgrounds arose the careers and fortunes of Leonardo da Vinci and Michaelangelo. Although both artists relied almost entirely upon patronage from cultured financiers like the Medicis, we associate the artistic glories of the Renaissance with the names da Vinci and Michaelangelo. The name Medici seldom comes to mind. Similarly, it may be Larry Wall (the inventor of Perl) rather than the spectacularly wealthy Larry Ellison that university students learn about in a century or two. And Linus Torvalds (creator of the Linux bazaar), rather than Bill Gates, may be the subject of epic films in the future.
In fact, I think there is only one way that history will give its due to Larry and Bill: These corporate giants must see the open source light, and they must blend the closed commercial world and the open intellectual world into an enlightened business solution that will last into the twenty-second century.
This scenario may represent sound business practice for them. There is a serious shift these days. With companies like Sun moving towards the Linux-based GNOME interface from the GNU project, and porting Linux to their SPARC chips, how long will it be before the bulk of their income comes from supporting SPARC hardware running Enterprise Linux solutions rather than the Solaris alternative? If that were to happen, Windows might survive the resulting onslaught only if Microsoft were prepared to accommodate open source--a thought that must send a visceral shiver through that particular corporate body! 1
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Assuming the operating-system war is essentially over (with merely a number of bloody battles left to fight), what about the next layer in the software world: applications? Most of these rely, in some form or another, upon databases, which provide the persistence of memory necessary within business systems. (Databases are, after all, the most popular of the various middleware technologies.)
And the database world is, of course, dominated by Oracle Corporation, with its main DB2 rival and several minor players. These corporations have accumulated a lot of power over the last 20 years. But recently, many business people have started to question (as they did with operating systems five or so years ago) whether the financial benefits derived from using databases should be so heavily concentrated in the bank accounts of Oracle shareholders. Particularly in the wake of recent market downturns, these users are looking for ways to reduce their costs and increase their benefits. Enter the LAMP paradigm shift. (LAMP = Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl or Python or PHP)
The MySQL database is starting to look more like a worthy competitor to Oracle's database server market. This is due to the recent addition of transactions to MySQL and the relatively easy availability of support from a burgeoning open source services market. PostgreSQL is also gaining momentum.
Open source databases have much to offer. After all, it's one thing to compare a $100,000 license for one proprietary database with a $105,000 license for another proprietary database that boasts a few extra widgets. But how do you effectively fight against a database that really does offer every feature your customers require, and that costs a grand total of zero dollars to install and no more than the proprietary databases to support? It doesn't take a Leonardo da Vinci to work that one out!
Fortunately, I believe Oracle will not make the same mistake the Windows people did five years ago when they dismissed Linux as a mere toy. Larry Ellison is far too intelligent for that. (And that's a blessing for my Oracle-based consultancy business, which is relying upon his business acumen to provide for my family's future income!). Oracle has already shown that they're willing to slowly adapt to open source. Consider:
- The Oracle port to Linux
- The inclusion of Oratcl within the Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) suite
- The distribution of Apache and Perl with Oracle's latest integrated Web product offerings
It remains to be seen how much further Oracle will go, and how quickly. However (and I've already prepared my will in case of God's heavenly thunderbolt), I predict that the Oracle database server itself will be open source within ten years. (If it isn't, it will no longer exist!) And as a direct result, Larry Ellison will make it into future history books along with Larry Wall, just as the merchant explorer Marco Polo remains almost as famous as Leonardo da Vinci.
The economics seem clear, and the progress of MySQL and other open source databases is unstoppable. They may not yet have achieved the proficiency of the Oracle database, but I'm betting they soon will. There is a bright spot for Oracle, though. Even if their database licensing profits are curtailed by a move to open source status, there is still a lot of money to be made from support, education, training, consulting, applications, and a whole host of other lucrative areas. Of course, Oracle isn't going to make money from these efforts if everyone is using MySQL. So I'm betting that Oracle will choose to release its source code tree at an appropriate time to keep it ahead of MySQL.
What makes me so sure? Well, I've worked as a consultant within Oracle as a DBA, within Sun as a Java developer, and I also teach Perl courses for Learning Tree. I don't have the global view of a corporate executive, but I do have a keen worm's-eye perspective from the software-development trenches, and down here in the mud, the shift is clear and evident: The number of Perl courses I've been asked to teach has been rapidly increasing, and the number attending each class has also been increasing. "Why are you here?" I ask my students. A typical response is, "So our company can move away from Windows and get into Apache, Linux, and Perl. That way, our accountant can cut a million off the software budget."
If I were a corporate software executive, I would regard this kind of statement as a clear and present danger. The recent economic downturn is further feeding the open source replacement cycle as a growing host of companies begin a rigorous search to remove unnecessary costs.
Footnote:
In the meantime, one open source group providing many superb Oracle tools for GNOME, Orasoft, will almost certainly continue to grow its Advantio business.
Andy Duncan is a psychology graduate and inveterate software dabbler who lives in Oxfordshire, England. He was the initial author of the Orac open source tool for Oracle database administration, development, and tuning. After a spell with Sun Microsystems in the late 1990s, working on Java-based software delivery systems, Andy began a period with Oracle Corporation in 1998 as an Oracle DBA contractor at their central EMEA Data Centre in the U.K. He remained there as a senior DBA through the January 2000 hurdle. He then returned to Sun as a Perl and Java Web consultant, moving away from database administration and back into full-time software development. He now combines various Internet projects for different clients with leading commercial Perl training courses for Learning Tree. He can be reached at andy_j_duncan@yahoo.com.
O'Reilly & Associates will soon release (April 2001) Oracle & Open Source.
Sample Chapter 1, Oracle Meets Open Source, is available free online.
You can also look at the Table of Contents, the Index, and the Full Description of the book.
For more information, or to order the book, click here.
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