Re: Open Source Oracle?

Mark C. Stock wrote:

> | HJR
>
> if i can get oracle 8 open source, why would i buy 9i? 10g?

Ask the question slightly differently. If I can get a wordprocessor/spreadsheet/office suite for free, why would I buy Microsoft Office?

Well, oddly enough, 85%+ of users still do. Because it's slick, it's smooth, it works (mostly). And everyone else is using it. And (in theory at least) if anything goes wrong, there's a bloody great software company that will help me sort it out.

It might help, too, that OpenOffice is not the world's most stable software, and lacks certain key bits of functionality, for some users (ie, me!) at least.

So the same would be true for OpenOracle vs. Oracle. If I need RAC, Data Guard, Workspace Manager or Cross-Platform Transportable Tablespaces, I would buy Oracle. The mere existence of a free version that lacks these crucial features wouldn't stop me paying Oracle hard cash,

If all I needed was a multi-versioning, transactional database that did the basics, OpenOracle would be a good place to start. But, being (let us imagine) based on Oracle version 7 code, there are a good lot of bugs to live with, so even then I might feel the need to shell out for the paid version.

The availability of a free version, in short, does not preclude the existence of the paid-for version. And whilst Oracle might lose out on the small-time operators and installations, they might take the opportunity to enhance their large-scale operations... and charge a (further!) premium for doing so... so there's money in it for them, too.

Alternatively, consider that little companies which start with freebie software have a habit of growing up to be big-ish companies that can pay good money for their software. Wouldn't it be a good idea to "infect" the minds of these sorts of people in the early, el-cheapo days, and clean up when the hard cash starts being passed around?

> at least for
> some apps (maybe a bunch) that would trim the market -- and since oracle
> is marketing driven, anything that detracts from that doesn't fly (except
> out the window)

As MS Office v OpenOffice shows, (or Windows v Linux itself, come to that), open source versus commercial is not a zero sum game.

Yes, it's true that Oracle is market-driven (as I suppose any commercial company is). But mindshare is important too. They could win a lot of that by making their obsolete versions freely available.

Regards
HJR
> ++ mcs
Received on Mon Sep 13 2004 - 17:02:33 CDT