Date: Sat, 8 Sep 2001 16:07:48 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Karun" <karun@dambiec.com>, <vk@vkci.com> Cc: <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Oracle! Message-ID: <004001c138bb$141a6b00$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <3B9A8094.9000904@dambiec.com>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: Karun [mailto:karun@dambiec.com] >Sent: Saturday, September 08, 2001 1:33 PM >To: vk@vkci.com >Cc: Ted Mittelstaedt; freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG; >inquiries@windriver.com; support@windriver.com >Subject: Re: Oracle! > > >Victor Kane wrote: > >>. >> >>You also failed to notice that Sun allows free downloads only for >>non-commercial use... Should we say you've lost sight of what >>motivates commercial software companies? >> >The free downloads can also be used commercialy for computers with up to >8 cpus >Karun > Thanks Karun, I cannot emphasize this enough. Victor, if you need a URL please go here: http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/binaries/index.html They have had over a MILLION licenses registered under this program. Let me just say this in regards to Oracle. Oracle is the sole reason that many people have Sun servers (Enterprise, etc.) Sun is not blind to this, and has worked closely with Oracle for years now as a result. I'm quite sure that a number of features have been added to Solaris specifically to assist Oracle, you might say that Solaris has been optimized for it. Now that Sun has the free licensing program, I fail to see why anyone responsible for a production Oracle server would be screwing around with any other platform, such as Windows NT, Linux, or even FreeBSD. And, I wrote a damn book about FreeBSD!!! Frankly, there's other databases (MySQL and Postgres) that work fine on Linux and FreeBSD, and if it's so all fired important to have a Free platform such as FreeBSD to run your database server, then WTF are you doing with a commercial database program like Oracle to start with? If your "database app" requires Oracle, then go back to the manufacturer of that app and demand they support one of the Free database programs. I think your missing the boat when you say that Oracle support is necessary to get FreeBSD in front of the CTO's of the world. What's necessary to get in front of the world's CTO's is an entire paradigm of switching their infrastructure over to Free solutions like FreeBSD. We've seen with the example of Hotmail that it's possible with enough money to selectively prune out the FreeBSD servers in an enterprise. Well, when you put an Oracle-on-Linux solution or an Oracle-on-FreeBSD solution into an enterprise your just setting up conditions so that some day in the future some fool is going to come in and hand-wave in front of the CTO and get that Linux or FreeBSD server replaced with a Sun or Windows NT server. Since they are already paying for Oracle, slipping in a commercial operating system fee into the budget won't raise any eyebrows. By contrast, if you ELIMINATE all of the commercial solutions and go ENTIRELY to Open Source/Free Source/whatever you want to call it, then at some point in the future, when some fool comes in, for them to replace components of that Free solution with commercial components is going to create a huge hue and cry. In short, they probably won't be able to do it. The enterprise is more likely to react by eliminating the fool instead of switching their entire IT infrastructure over to a set of commercial solutions. In summary, I've spent a lot of time working on integrating Free solutions into commercial network infrastructures. But, increasingly I've come to the realization that the old idea of FreeBSD being the servers and Windows being the desktops is not what we should be shooting for. I'll grant the Linux folks this much - they have figured out that getting ahold of the desktop space is one of the keys. Unfortunately what they have not understood is that by emphasizing Linux support of all manner of commercial applications, they are selling out and creating an environment where if people like Microsoft and Sun want to get rid of them, it's pretty easy to do it - just give away the operating system. Microsoft already did this to put Netscape out of business, Sun is doing it to put Linux out of business, do you want Microsoft to do it t o FreeBSD too?!?!? Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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