Ann W. Harrison wrote:

>>>On 25-May-2004 00:12:37, marius popa wrote:
>>>What next? oracle open sourc-ed :)
>>>I even can't imagine that ...
>
> Nor me either. For the corporate world, Open Source is a convenient
> (plausibly deniable?) graveyard for cash cows that have gone dry.
> That's not my point of view, but that's what seems to happen.

Actually I can imagine Oracle (the DB) being open sourced (at least
partly, or with a custom license or to certain customers, ala Microsoft)
someday, between 10-20 years from now. Open source DBs are getting more
advanced every day, and with many big corporates slowly moving to using
them, they will gain "enterprise" features like clustering, high
availability features, etc. Sooner or later, there will be little
incentive from using such an expensive product where an open source
product will do. Think or Firebird or Postgres as the equivalent of
Apache of the DB in the future.

I'm not sure of how much of a cash cow is Oracle DB now, but Oracle has
for some time been trying to get into application arena (e.g. trying to
acquire Peoplesoft, etc). They know they wouldn't last more than 10-20
years if they stay focusing on the DB product.

--
dave