Red Hat exec knocks Oracle open source strategy
Oracle "isn't even open source", says Cormier
By Jon Brodkin | Network World US | Published: 10:10, 25 May 2010
It's been said that Oracle is now the industry's most powerful open source vendor, but don't tell that to Red Hat executives, who say Oracle doesn't even qualify as an open source company. When Oracle bought Sun, controller of Java, MySQL and OpenSolaris, Gartner analyst George Weiss argued that the acquisition made Oracle "the most powerful open source vendor in the market today, bar none."
As distributor of the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat takes exception to that kind of talk. Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat, said in a new interview that he doesn't even consider Oracle to be an open source vendor, and argued that even Sun wasn't as open as Red Hat.
"I wouldn't even consider calling them an open source company at all," Cormier said. "When you're making a choice as a company on what's open and what's closed then your customers suffer."
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Sun sometimes held back "the good stuff" from the open source community in developing MySQL, making important contributions to the software proprietary, Cormier said. The major open source software products controlled by Sun will remain in the public domain, but Cormier said, "Open is not just seeing the code. Open is also having a community of developers. OpenSolaris is not open. There is no community other than Sun people developing Solaris."
"There are pieces [of Oracle] that are open," Cormier continued. "But what we do, is open everything. We don't say 'here's this part of the operating system that's open, but this other part is closed.'"
Oracle's purchase of Sun has caused mixed feelings in the open source world. Sun's chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, left the company after the acquisition, but some analysts have argued that open source could thrive under Oracle, because it is more financially stable than Sun was. One key area to watch is the Java Community Process, which helps dictate the future of Java by developing new technology specifications and reference implementations.
Cormier said he's not too worried about Oracle's newfound influence over Java development.
"The jury's still out on how it's going to be managed," he said. "We're all watching. We're feverishly in our development cycle right now, as we always have been."
