Oracle buys Open Source vendors, was: Windows-like registry for Linux?

[Bill McGonigle]

On Feb 15, 2006, at 11:35, Ted Roche wrote:

> Yeah, what's up with that? InnoDB last year and now Sleepycat. I've 
> done a few development projects with Oracle 8 and 9, but I'm not 
> well-informed on how they work. I understand Oracle buys a fair number 
> of small software companies. Is this like CA, who absorbs and 
> smothers?

Oracle usually buys market segments and mindshare.  So they bought 
PeopleSoft because it competed with Oracle's product.  They've bought 
Clinical Trials companies because they were competitors.  They bought 
Corporate Time because they didn't have an Exchange competitor.  They 
exhibit the positive and negative aspects of The Borg in this regard.

> What do you think they are up to?

I don't know.  I don't think they do either.  But people who say, "Why 
would I use Oracle when I can use MySQL with InnoDB?," or, "I don't 
need Oracle, I have BerkeleyDB," get to say they're Oracle customers 
now.  Or vice-versa.  Which is probably well worth the acquisition 
price of either company to Larry.  I bet it's to shut up some Wall 
Street analyst.

If I had to guess, their next acquisition will be Greenplum, which 
makes a commercial extension to PostgreSQL which competes favorably 
with Oracle RAC.  Since it's not open source yet, now's a great time to 
keep it that way.  Live by the BSD license, die by the BSD license.

-Bill
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