While Oracle Corp. is committed to the open source movement and its standards, database code will remain proprietary because there will be difficulties in providing services if customers make alterations to the source code.
That"s the view of Oracle chairman and CEO, Larry Ellison, who made his comments about the database code at the Oracle OpenWorld in Beijing recently.
Laurence Liew, manager of the SCS Linux Competency Centre, Singapore Computer Systems, agreed. He said Ellison"s concern is a legitimate business issue, as open source software gets lots of changes, patches and bug fixes done frequently. For a vendor to support its product, it will have to work on the code in a known state.
Even so, Ellison cited Oracle"s participation in the open source movement with its contribution of clustering technology in Red Hat Linux in its recent announcement of Unbreakable Linux (see story).
Unbreakable Linux is an initiative by Oracle, Red Hat and Dell to provide enterprise class database servers on Linux. According to Rene Bonvanie, vice president, Oracle9i and OTN marketing, "unbreakable" refers to a database that will not go down, even if the server fails or if the site fails. It also refers to the security standard involved; Oracle9i has 15 international security certifications worldwide.
Another open source supporter is IBM.