Oracle database code will not become open source

Computerworld - 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.

"Supporting Linux clusters is a new concept for Oracle, but not for IBM," said Jim Koerner, vice president for Data Management, Asia Pacific, IBM. "IBM's support for the open source movement is widely known."

According to Koerner, customers do not want to be locked in by proprietary standards, leading to the growing interest in open standards.

Meanwhile, at the Oracle conference, Derek Williams, executive vice president for the comapny's Asia Pacific division, said that more then 75% of Oracle's revenues in the region are derived through its Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN).

Oracle hopes the launch of the OPN in Chinese will be an incentive for more potential partners to join the Oracle community .

Oracle also announced a new reseller offering designed specifically for medium-sized businesses in the Asia Pacific region. The packaged offering will be available through the OPN as a pre-installed system and can be implemented either in-house or as an outsourced service.

The new offering is designed to help partners integrate processes such as purchasing, selling and shipping, inventory management, cash management, budgeting and financial reporting, said Williams.

Oracle also announced support for Sun Microsystems Unix operating system, Solaris 9. According to Oracle, the compatibility will allow applications built on Oracle's clustering technology torun without modification in the Sun environment. Using Oracle9i Real Application Clusters, customers can scale their applications in a cluster that acts as a single database. The feature uses the resource management facility of Sun Cluster 3.0 5/02 to enhance server utilization of the cluster environment.