Re: native Oracle-port on Linux -- what would it take?

John S. Dyson wrote:
>

 [lorena was here]
> AFAIK, they are very well aware of the free software marketplace, and
> profits that could be made.

[lorena was here, too]

I think Oracle + Linux could make a very mutually amenable relationship.

Two weeks ago, Oracle stock took a *major* tumble, something like twenty percent of its value. Aside from the usual volitility of tech stocks, the two reasons cited for this drop were slow sales for the Oracle*Applications product line and that Oracle is losing share to some zany maverick up-and-comer called MicroSoft, which has a (comparatively) cheap RDBMS (MS SQL Server) running on a (comparatively) inexpensive OS (NTAS) on (comparatively) dirt cheap hardware that offer a *lot* more bang for the buck than some unghodly-many-processor Unix system, at least as long as you're serving fewer than 20GB of data to fewer than 1000 concurrent querents, give or take. That particular customer niche is pretty large, and its denizens won't make Oracle-size purchases when they can get away with SQL Server-size purchases.

No doubt Oracle will maintain its viability as The Thing To Run When Serving Data to Great Big Company, but it's getting chipped away at the lower end of the Laffer curve where you sell lots of small for cheap instead of few for more. If they want to have any presence at that end of the spectrum, they should investigate two swift moves:

1. Get a version of the RDBMS running under Linux, *even if it's not officially supported*, and sell it for cheap.
2. Get the Oracle Web Server (and SQL*Net) running under Linux, and sell it for cheap.

Web Server 2.1.1 on Linux would be a sweet setup. There are so many Linux boxen serving as Web machines anyway, and standing up quite well under rather high loads. Having Oracle Web Server hitting an RDBMS instance somewhere behind the firewall, whether it's on another Linux box or an MVS Leviathan sounds like a winner to me, even for Large Corporations.

Many Large Corporations are eager to start doing "Extranet" applications for their customers, but want to do it for cheap or at least test the concept for cheap. What's cheaper than Linux on a 64MB Pentium/200 stolen out of some vacationing MBA's cube? Besides, the Large Corporation already has all of its data on Oracle anyway, right?

Larry's always been big on the Internet. Targeting Linux could make his products into the de facto Internet standard for databases. If he's worried about tarnishing his product's image to where banks won't use it, he can call the Linux version "Oracle/LX" or set up a spin-off corporation, like Honda did with Acura, only targetted down instead of up.

Here's a rumor: two years ago I was taking an Oracle class, and the very subject of Oracle on Linux came up. The instructor said he had heard of the issue, and said Oracle's concern at the time was a *legal* rather than a marketing issue. It seems that Oracle's legal department was under the impression that any product that ran under Linux was automatically subject to the GPL, which would have forced them to publish the source code. My understanding is that this is not something they want to do. My other understanding is that this is not true, but who's Larry gonna believe, some random Linux [w]hacker or one of his high-priced lawyers who snarfed the wrong version of the GPL?

Maybe they wanted to dynamically link libc; I dunno.

-- 
these are my opinions, not theirs.  they probably shouldn't be yours,
either, in case they're wrong or sumthin'...