Larry Ellison (2006): If an open source product gets good enough, we'll take it

http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto041820061306424713

by bensummers • 16 years ago

45 30 16 years ago

us.ft.com

j_baker• 16 years ago

In case anyone hasn't already figured it out, this should be proof that you shouldn't take anything Ellison says too seriously. He's like the tech crunch of CEOs.

jonknee3• 16 years ago

Why isn't he serious here? He's not suggesting anything nefarious--he's simply stating that when open source is good enough his company will begin to use it (for free) and make money with it. Seems logical.

sprout• 16 years ago

The part where he's talking out of his ass is where he claims that Oracle can support Red Hat better than Red Hat.

I'll grant that Oracle can support Oracle running on Red Hat better, but that's a different story.

chadmalik• 16 years ago

I disagree. Love him or hate him, Larry Ellison interviews are consistently very blunt and informative. He often gives a very clear definition of what Oracle's strategy is/will be. For instance he called the enterprise sw consolidation and then executed on it.

lzw2• 16 years ago

Whereby "Take it" he says:

No. If an open source product gets good enough, we'll simply take it. Take [the web server software] Apache: once Apache got better than our own web server, we threw it away and took Apache. So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it – a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that's what we'll do. So it is not disruptive at all – you have to find places to add value. Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane. Keep in mind it's not that good in most places yet. We're a big supporter of Linux. At some point we may embed Linux in all of our products and provide support.

muhfuhkuh• 16 years ago

He did do that, he "took" Red Hat Enterprise Linux software source code, recompiled it, called "unbreakable Linux" and proceeded to undercut Red Hat in support pricing.

By most accounts, it's an unmitigated disaster. I think they sold like the first reference sales and then trickled to almost nothing. They still use the term "unbreakable Linux" but there is no OS product marketed around it anymore.

Sometimes people don't like the cheaper knockoffs.

lzw2• 16 years ago

That's the market at work. I'm sure Larry is not crying over this failure, and if it had been a success it would have only succeeded by spreading linux to more institutions and improving the linux marketplace, market size, etc.

dotBen2• 16 years ago

I never really understood why Oracle forked RH into their own distro, but from this now I can see - it was to essentially demonstrate the cessation of their support of RedHat (given that LE was claiming in the FT piece that Oracle was supporting/helping RedHat at the time) by giving them a little kick in nuts.

I think the customers that bought up Oracle Linux were the kind of dumb sheep customers who'll buy anything a vendor pushes them (yes, there are many of those out there).

Informed customers not happy with RHEL licensing and support simply swap out to CentOS.

It's an interesting examination of customer behavior in fact.

ora600• 16 years ago

Actually, the customers that use OEL are normally customers of the Oracle database. They get the OS for free as part of the license deal and enjoy not having to play the finger-pointing game with Oracle and RH support any more.

You have no idea what a relief it is when your DB vendor can't blame the OS for bugs and performance problems, and actually have to solve them.

Thats why we love it when Oracle does storage, network and hardware (i.e. Exadata) - we love having one throat to choke.

hyperbovine• 16 years ago

This is exactly the way open source is supposed to work.

rajat• 16 years ago

How is what he's saying different from what RMS has said how you should make money with open source software? You might not like Ellison, but making money by offering support services is perfectly legitimate with open source software.

jonknee3• 16 years ago

> You might not like Ellison, but making money by offering support services is perfectly legitimate with open source software.

Agreed, but with Oracle it's more like bundling free code with very expensive not free code and then supporting the whole package. Case in point about what he mentioned regarding Apache.

dotBen2• 16 years ago

with Oracle it's more like bundling free code with very expensive not free code and then supporting the whole package

Sure but that's called a 'solution' (sorry for the enterprise corp dev speak). Most FOSS projects don't solve a customer's problem in their own right and larger customers want to buy into solutions not disparate projects that they then have to put together and maintain.

These customers don't see it as X amount of free code and Y amount of 'very expensive not free code'. They just see the sum of X+Y and a price point.

To use a completely left-field expression for this context: don't hate the player, hate the game.

hasenj• 16 years ago

> So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it – a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing

Doesn't that just piss you off?

This is not what RMS and the "Free Software" advocates say about making money from free software.

What this guy is saying is, we'll take open source and embed it in our proprietary products and we don't owe anyone anything.

loumf• 16 years ago

You can make money from free software (according to RMS), you just can't restrict usage and exercise of rights. It amounts to what LE is saying -- sell the support. If Oracle includes GPL software, then they have to make the software that embeds it GPL as well. Apache is different.

Tichy• 16 years ago

Is there a problem?

dasil003• 16 years ago

Man is he a shark. Seriously, between him, Steve Jobs, and Eric Schmidt it's no wonder a glorified sales guy like Ballmer is lost in the wilderness.

korch2• 16 years ago

Hubris like this triggers unstoppable nerd rage in me. I can't even imagine how big of a jerk one would have to be to seriously believe they can appropriate the work & passion of hundreds of thousands of developers from all over the world who are giving the fruits of their labors and imagination to the world. Ellison flat out doesn't understand software and thus he deserves to get completely steam-rolled by the open-source community, just like we did to Balmer a decade ago with Linux. Oracle could not be killed fast enough for my liking. For far too many decades Ellison has fucked up the software industry, like a parasite siphoning money off of everybody. Now you may think that's an inflammatory remark and that Oracle really does provide "real" value to their customers. (I've had to use Oracle for real work, and there is not a single thing I like about it.)

Bollocks!

Invert the question: for every dollar of "profit" diverted to Ellison, imagine the lost opportunity cost to the rest of us—what else could those billions of dollars have been spent on other than a shitty, obscenely overpriced database that belongs back in 1983 and that is entrenched into the biggest Gordian-knot of enterprise vendor-lock-in? A helluva a lot more good could have been done in the world if Ellison was a pauper. He might have even been a good man before he had all that money, though I doubt it.

My only question is: how best can the open-source community align itself to cut off Oracle's air supply?

Now that Google is unabashedly marching under the evil flag of Mordor, can't they just open up Big Table or something for enterprise customers, and snatch the pebble from Ellison's hand? Since day one, Google's dominant strategy has always been to take an expensive, over-engineered technology that other megacorps sell, scale it off the charts of those selling it, and then give it away, recouping the difference by becoming the quasi-impartial steward of the Internet.

I don't think NoSQL yet has the traction to put two bullets in the back of Oracle's skull and call it suicide, though as we saw with the success(and then failure) of MySQL, the situation can change in as little as a few years.

artsrc• 16 years ago

Oracle is a many headed beast.

I think that PostgreSQL (RedHat database etc.) can serve most (but not all) of the applications Oracle DB serves.

There is an application server business (BEA), hardware business (Sun) and applications (PeopleSoft, Siebel).

StavrosK2• 16 years ago

I don't understand. If you substitute "take" with "use", which is basically what he says, what's the problem? Having Oracle DBs run on Linux is good for Linux, surely, no? Having whatever-he-was-talking-about run on Apache is a vote of confidence for Apache, and it's probably getting some corporate patches.

Where's the harm in that?

korch2• 16 years ago

You are absolutely right in pointing out that Linux has greatly benefited from being able to run Oracle. But I would argue that Linux no longer needs Oracle more than Oracle needs Linux. Linux has been mainstream for many years now, while Oracle has lost a lot of ground to Mysql, Postgres, etc and is greatly waning in influence. (Even though Oracle will never go away, much in the same way IBM and mainframes will never go away).

IMHO Ellison's lack of distinction between "take" & "use" is precisely the harm. The danger is how easily that becomes the Embrace & Extinguish strategy. He obviously sees no such distinction himself and imagines that he's big and powerful enough to just take whatever he wants. He sounds like a modern day warlord, and not in the good way. In my book, any individual who assumes that much power, without giving back in proportion, deserves to be shut down on general principle. How is it possible to respect one of the most eminent business leaders on Earth when he shoots his dumb mouth off in public like that? At best he reveals his inability to strategize & maintain coalitions, and at worst he reveals his sociopathic hubris. Being so mighty he would do well to learn the value of at least trying to listen to the advice of his PR viziers, and wear a false-face of humility in public, so as to not trigger indefensible public outrage. Which would lead to eventual Federal investigations—anyone as big as Oracle has a graveyard of skeletons buried in the basement.

I can forgive accidents, stupidity, and even short-term, limited corporate greed(implicit in The Game); but never when it's backed by the treacherous potential to cause long-term harm to much weaker open source allies. Linux, Java, Apache and other open source software projects are not mere pawns to be moved around the chess board upon which Oracle, Apple, Google and IBM engage in battle.

I hope the hippie idealism of open source populism hasn't been drowned in the ocean of money, but is instead still alive & kicking—Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Against_the_Wall_Motherfucke...

hc• 16 years ago

chill bro

nailer• 16 years ago

> thus he deserves to get completely steam-rolled by the open-source community, just like we did to Balmer a decade ago with Linux.

Do you perhaps mean:

'Just like we did to Sun with Linux.'

As Windows was just fine. Linux on the desktop never happened.

Alternatively:

'Just like we're doing to Ballmer with KHTML and Firefox.'

compay2• 16 years ago

To all those who read the title and think "OMG Oracle is so evil," by "take it", he means "use it in compliance with its license and build business around supporting it."

I'm not a fan of Oracle but the title given here on HN is kinda deceptive.

bensummers• 16 years ago

The title is a direct quote from the interview, with one word, 'just', removed to fit the 80 chars limit.

compay2• 16 years ago

And selective quoting is never deceptive or equivalent to editorializing, right? :)

code_duck• 16 years ago

He said they were going to replace their own offerings with OSS once it was good enough, and build a support based business around it.

So... if I recall correctly, that is how a company is SUPPOSED to make money from open source, by offering support. He did say 'exploit', which is more accurate, but seriously, it's not necessarily in a bad way. He didn't say they were going to 'embrace and extinguish' it, for instance, and that doesn't appear to be their aim.

That said, I'm pretty wary of their actions regarding Java.

aphexairlines• 16 years ago

In other words, open source developers partially enriched Oracle as a glorified consultancy to the point where the company could buy Sun and its patents for aggressive litigation against an open source project?

Larry Ellison (2006): If an open source product gets good enough, we'll take it

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