Remember when Oracle was the good guy?
Though our bodies get older, our minds remain relatively young. Sure, we're scarred and matured by experiences, but our bodies age much faster than our minds. It turns out that companies are much the same.
Take Oracle, for example. We sometimes give Oracle grief for being the quintessentially Machiavellian company, with a hard-driving sales culture and bent on nefarious designs to lock in customers, but the company was founded under very different principles.
Oracle made its fortune promoting the SQL standard which, despite its problems, freed the world from mainframe lock-in, as Alfresco CEO John Powell, an early Oracle employee, reminded me recently. (Disclosure: John is my boss.)
Prior to Oracle, if you wanted to write database technologies, your choices were IBM's IMS, Cullinet's IDMS, or other proprietary solutions that were locked to specific mainframe hardware and the application was locked to the data.
Oracle (and IBM) opened up the market with SQL-based relational databases, thereby allowing independence between data and their associated applications. Oracle's message was "freedom of customers from mainframe lock-in." Starting with the VAX, Oracle gave customers freedom to negotiate between different mini-computer hardware suppliers.
Oracle was, in other words, the open-source vendor of its day, delivering customer choice.
Oracle has since become a massive corporation, and attracts all the suspicion that success often breeds. But perhaps its soul (early employees) is still young and concerned with openness, even if its body (the infrastructure) may not be.
It's especially intriguing for me to watch one of Oracle's longest-serving employees, Ken Jacobs (Employee number 18), take on increased responsibilities within Oracle's open source-related businesses. Jacobs has been involved with InnoDB, Oracle's first foray into MySQL, and it's likely that he'll play a big role in managing the company's MySQL business, too.
This may well be the perfect fit for Jacobs: he grew up touting Oracle as a freedom fighter. Now he gets to do it again, at a time when the industry sees Oracle very differently than when Jacobs started at Oracle over two decades ago.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
I realize you are paid by Open Source propaganda machines such as Redhat to do your dirty deeds here on CNET. Its been obvious for months now that you are being paid by them to speak pure bliss about them. Its quite obvious you are on Oracles pay list too. I have never gotten a free laptop from Microsoft, I did get a laptop from AMD/ACER to review and it so happened to come with the Windows operating system and this was 3 years ago btw.
Remember tolerance is important while blogging for a tech site especially when you get paid for it.
Their sales tactics were brutal and based on FUD. Their attitudes toward competitors was not aggressive but condescending. I attended one sales seminar at their office in Cincinnati back in 1988 and vowed never to talk to these guys again, no matter how good their product was.
I ended up working on a project that used Oracle and grew to appreciate P/SQL, but I'd never choose them if I had a choice.
And, there were plenty of other alternatives at the time -- not just the ones you mentioned. Sybase for one.
Good Guys? Open? (shaking head in disbelief).
Here's a better headline:
Remember when Oracle Swallowed up PeopleSoft?
I have seen old mainframe hierarchical database systems, and they were hideous to maintain. Relational databases paved the way for widespread client server and web based computing. Oracle actually created a database system that could handle small loads and also scale up to handle massive transaction processing.
Sure Oracle is expensive, but it has proved that it works. Just ask all the companies across the world that use Oracle; they will all say that Oracle keeps their company operating.
By the way, do you really need the source code for Oracle's products? How about worrying less about Oracle's source code and worry more about your own source code.
The prices they charge goes beyond outrageous.
I agree with what other people have written - I doubt anyone in their right mind would ever compare Oracle/Ellison to an open-source organization. (Nor do I think, as many appear to, that simply doing open-source confers some sort of god-like quality upon an individual or an organization)
Back in the days when Oracle got its start there was plenty of public-domain software out there. Oracle was not one of them. The industry itself was much different, we didn't have a mass-market shrinkwrapped software industry at all, and most computing was undertaken by large, wealthy corporations who could afford the very expensive hardware and software. The vast majority of computing was mainframe and minicomputer based.
Oracle was founded in 1977, which was an era where the very first home computers were just starting to appear. The IBM PC didn't exist yet, Apple Computer had just incorporated. I don't think it took a "virtuous hero" to jump on the bandwagon of moving away from traditional mainframe computing - that trend was already apparent before Oracle hit the scene. Both Microsoft and Apple were founded 2 years prior.
Despite some people being unable to read in any way but literally, when he wrote that Oracle were the open-source vender of the time what he meant was that Oracle were freeing people from vendor lock-in with hardware in the same way open source does with software today.
Of course there's also the point that if Oracle were seen as such a positive influence then only to become such a hated company then this is something which may well happen to some open source companies in the future. Maybe 10 years from now people will be baying for Red Hat's blood. It's possibly something to keep in mind to be critical of open source companies when they do things that aren't right, even if it's in our favour. Otherwise we'll all become soulless shills like Mr Dee up there.
And Oracle was not built on an ideal, it was built around a paradigm shift in data acess and management. Ellison and crew simply seized on the opportunity and grew it into an empire.
It really bugs me when people assign nobility to getting a paycheck, especially in the tech industry. Maybe if you're working for the Red Cross, saving disaster victims or Habitat, building homes for the poor...but hey, if it makes you feel better about your job to pretend you are on some holy quest, then have at it.
--Zack
Go for any banking , airlines and military .. everything is either in Mainframe or DB2UDB
and every other critical application needs to have more resource to support (for a full backup for its risk mitigation)
Administration is far better for Mainframes and UDB , Ask anyone who has both Oracle and DB2 exposure
In the past you have stretched the definition of open source well beyond reality, but you have certainly found undiscovered country with this article.
-Brian
Honestly, I believe this, too.
- by knorth68 August 15, 2009 12:00 PM PDT
- Matt Asay wrote:
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(32 Comments)>> Ken Jacobs
Jacobs has been an important contributor to Oracle's success.
>> Prior to Oracle, if you wanted to write database technologies, your choices were IBM's IMS, Cullinet's IDMS, or other proprietary solutions that were locked to specific mainframe hardware ...
Not exactly. The first SQL standard was in 1986, but the first database standard arrived in the 1970s. There were a number of database management systems that complied with the CODASYL (network model) database standard.
IBM IMS is not a CODASYL-compliant DBMS but Cullinet IDMS (now CA-IDMS) is. Other CODASYL products included Honeywell IDS, Univac DMS-1100 and several Digital Equipment Corporation DBMSs. In the '70s and '80s, CODASYL-compliant DBMS products were available on a variety of 36-bit and 32-bit computers.
In 1994, Digital sold its CODASYL DBMS to Oracle. The product is now Oracle CODASYL DBMS and it runs on 64-bit machines. The data sheet is at:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/rdb/pdf/dbms.pdf