

Larry Ellison (2006): If an open source product gets good enough, we'll take it - bensummers
http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto041820061306424713

======
dasil003
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.

------
rajat
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.

~~~
jonknee
> 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.

~~~
dotBen
_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.

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

~~~
compay
And selective quoting is _never_ deceptive or equivalent to editorializing,
right? :)

------
hasenj
> 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
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.

------
aphexairlines
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?

------
Tichy
Is there a problem?

------
korch
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.

~~~
StavrosK
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?

~~~
korch
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_Against_the_Wall_Motherfuckers)

~~~
StavrosK
I agree with everything you say, but this article says more about Ellison than
Linux. He just sounds pompous, arrogant and irrelevant, I don't think he
presents that big of a threat. Certainly not the way some other commenters
have taken it, some people seem to think that it means he can extinguish
whichever large OSS project he wants at whim.

------
lzw
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
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.

~~~
lzw
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.

------
j_baker
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.

~~~
jonknee
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
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.

~~~
jonknee
From what I've read about Ellison, I don't doubt he believes Oracle can
support Red Hat better than Red Hat can support Red Hat. You and I believe
otherwise, but that has nothing to do with what Larry Ellison believes.

