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Oracle Japan Pushing Linux Business, Targets NT 54

Posted by Hemos from the getting-it-into-the-cross-hairs dept.
bigengineer writes "As the subject says, according to this story, Oracle Japan wants their customers to migrate to linux. I don't think they need much encouragment. " Many of the standard reasons why, as an Oracle rep states: "Many NT users have trouble with NT operations" and "Some users complain about NT's poor performance in data analysis and some say they need to reboot the operating system regularly. " What's equally interesting is the number of companies Oracle Japan will partner with to provide the support. Linux support is getting to be big business.
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Oracle Japan Pushing Linux Business, Targets NT More

Oracle Japan Pushing Linux Business, Targets NT

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  • That Oracle is bringing out all of their software on the Linux platform is interesting news. But that wasn't the topic of this article. This article simply says that one reseller in Japan is moving to Linux, and that Oracle is going to try to persuade more resellers to distribute Oracle/Linux to their customers.

    My point is that small resellers in Japan are even less significant in The Grand Scheme of Things(tm) than small resellers are here in the U.S. Given Oracle's pricing practices, I think it is a fair question to ask if this means that Oracle is backing Linux in a big way--or if Oracle is writing off small customers, steering them to resellers (and Linux) for installation and support.

    IMHO, this article is a whole lot more PR than news.

  • Man, that probably rules out most (hopefully all) of the female hackers!

    "Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot."

  • Well, easy, wait till the first 10 Supercomputers of the world, the nasa saturn mission, the superpowers icbms, ibm's and sun's enterprise machines and every SAP-installation around is on linux ;-).
    Then tell the people "If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for you, too."
    I expect this to work better than the other way around, which microsoft tries ;-).

  • Re:NT.... does it really crash that often? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I work on a company where we have been using NT for 3 years, we have only one file server at the network running NT 4.0 SP5 We *never* have problems with it and it's very uncommon to restart that box, I must admit we have to disconnect some users from the shares because some client-side application leaves unwanted locked files on it. It does a hard work since there are 80 workstations using it 6 days a week, 18 hours a day and all the users are forced to use that server for storing all the work they do (9gb total) so, what's that all about NT crashing that often? I hear that all the time but personally never had such experience on a well cofigured nt running a descent hardware. I'm not saying NT is as solid as a linux. But it can be really stable enough for file sharing. I'm not an NT lover, actually we have 3 linux servers and just 2 NT's and we are about to migrate both of them to linux soon, beacuse they are way better in performance. don't blame the NT that much, check your hardware first and then fine tune the OS.
  • However, this particular incident only shows that Linux is doing well in the server market.
    I see you've bought into the silliness that there's such a computer as a "server".
    But what about the desktop market???
    I see you've also bought into the silliness that there's such a computer as a "desktop".

    There are no servers. There are no desktops. There are only computers, networks, and programs. If the computer is on the net, and you can talk to it, then that doesn't mean it's a server. If it can talk to you, that doesn't mean you're a client.

    Throw off the shackles of Microsoft's feudal system of lords and serfs. Start thinking about a free world of equal peers.

    It seems that MS still holds the reins in the PC market, and Linux is only barely making its entry there.
    And for strike three, we have this whole "PC" == "personal computer" silliness.

    Sigh. Maybe Babelfish should offer a Microsoft-to-hacker [perl.com] translation service, and Slashdot can provide a link.

    As a proof (or rather, vague indication) of this, perhaps we could do a poll here on /. on how many people still dual-boots to Windows. I think I can almost predict the results..
    "Still"? Hello?

    The answer is never. Never ever ever ever ever. I never did, and I never will. In two decades of computer use, I have not once had an MS-damaged computer. I've never touched the stuff, and neither have most of my programmer friends.

    We are the masters of our own computers, independent wayfarers without enslaving ties to the local master, Lord Bill. To him we pay no taxes, nor from him do we hope for rescue in our hour of darkness. We grow our own food, defend our own homes, write our own tales, seek our own solutions. We are freemen, not serfs.

  • Linux support as a buisness model (Score:4)

    by Money__ ( 87045 ) on Friday November 26, 1999 @07:18AM (#1503382)
    It's nice to see Larry E. and the 'black tower boys' pushing people to avoid ms products. Oracle has been taking this approach for years, and it's good for Open Source, good for developers, and good for users.

    What concerns me most, however, is view points like: "Linux support is getting to be big business."

    When publicly traded companys (with a responsibility to there share holders) are forced to choose between a consulting/support 'revenue stream' (ack!) and lowering bariers to development, I'm afraid they'll choose the former.

    Imagine, if you will, General Motors relasing a car with 'OpenDash 1.0.0'. Upon entering the car, you notice that the numbers on the speedometer are encrypted, the ignition key goes in the CD player, and the gear shifter is on the rear view mirror. This is an example of a design that is functional, but designed to foster factory support.

    Imagine, if you will, a distro/support company releasing source code for a 'Must Have' app and finding no comments in the source code, data structures thought up by a chimp on acid, and a layout that only the bravest of coders could handle. This is an example of a design that is functional, but designed to foster factory support.

    It's my hope that distro/support companies will balance support revenue streams with encouraging development and clean code.

  • Just curious (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But does this mean that NT is a lousy operating system

    OR

    that Oracle on NT is a lousy port?

    I take Larry Ellison telling me not to use NT with about as much salt as I take Scott Mcnealy telling me not to use NT: about 2 lbs of salt!

    ;-)
  • Tom, Tom, Tom. Good to see that people still need asbestos suits to be around you. As usual though, you make a good point. Client-server is properly a software distinction, intended to promote intelligent partitioning and reuse of code. Still, the initial question of this thread is a good one: Who is still dual booting/using M$, and how often? I myself dual boot both my laptop and my SMP monster at home. BTW Tom, when Larry Wall came through Chicago this summer, he was good enough to stop by the local Perl Mongers meeting and give us some tips. When can we expect you to grace us with your presence?
  • As a proof (or rather, vague indication) of this, perhaps we could do a poll here on /. on how many people still dual-boots to Windows. I think I can almost predict the results..

    I used to dual-boot Windows until one day I accidently told lilo to place 600K of linux kernel smack on top of the windows 98 root directory. I was on the road, and wouldn't you know it I had the OEM re-install disk, but no magic number to type into the product authorization screen. Faced with the option of (1) humiliating myself by calling M$'s 1-800-RULEGIT (I didn't make that up) or (2) finally installing on Linux and learning to use the remaining packages that Windows was still hanging around on my hard disk for - I bit the bullet and did what I had to do.

    Well, it turns out that it was just my imagination that I ever needed Windows. I haven't run Windows once in the last 2 months, and It feels good.

    Sure, there are still a few rough spots, especially in the apps. But it gets easier every month. My wife is now a linux user too - she's really not very computer-literate and she doesn't have trouble.

    The time has come when we can realistically lose those dual-boots. Hey, freeing up 2 more gig for linux apps is really useful.
  • Good. There have to be *some* people left running NT, otherwise whatever would we talk about here? ;-)
  • Still, the initial question of this thread is a good one: Who is still dual booting/using M$, and how often?
    People who never bothered to learn how to get what they wanted to do done on their own. The only possible reason I can conceive of for using Microsoft is lack of personal programming prowess, inadequate imagination or TUITs, or unfamiliarity with existing alternatives. I really do not understand why a programmer would ever touch it. After all, programmers solve their own problems.
    BTW Tom, when Larry Wall came through Chicago this summer, he was good enough to stop by the local Perl Mongers meeting and give us some tips. When can we expect you to grace us with your presence?
    Gracefullness is probably not one of my primary Attributes. :-) The probable answer is when I'm in the area. Considering that I grew up in the Chicago area (well, loosely: Lake Geneva, just down the street from Gary Gygax (whom I worked for), if that means anything to anyone anymore) and necessarily return there several times a year puts your chances higher than other groups' chances of the same. Send mail if you'd like to hear me talk, and upon which topic.
  • Yeah, that's dead right - out here, people are used to alternatives; Apple got here first and made a big inpact, and Microsoft didn't get so much of a chance to monopolise. Hence, we're seeing a lot of `alternative' (from a US p.o.v.) OSes becoming really popular; Linux, of course, but FreeBSD is in in a very big way too. (It's quite nice to be able to walk into a newsagents in my town and have a wide choice of Linux and Unix magazines. :)
    In that sense, the Oracle announcement (I haven't looked at it yet, so I'm shooting from the hip here) doesn't really surprise me; there were once noises that Oracle US were going to be offering OS support for Linux - not just support for their own products on Linux. I'm not sure what happened to this.
    Still, this is all good publicity, and it's excellent ammunition for the guys like RedHat, TurboLinux, LASER5 and all the other distributors we've got over here.
    Someone else mentioned about code being sent back to the public: I'm not aware of any Oracle development that has been fed back to the Open Source Community, but if there is, I'd like to hear about it!
  • Suppose the 'bravest of coders' untangle the mess and reimplement in clean GPL or BSD licensed code? Buggy software and draconian licensing schemes are already proving to be intolerable when an alternative exists. Why should the market tolerate code designed to cost money simply to maintain it in a sane fashion?
  • Of course Microsoft doesn't fix such user-discovered bugs. To do so would require a maintenance section of a size that would utterly dwarf their current one (which would be hugely expensive but they could probably just about afford it) hooked into such an astronomically gigantic, world-wide, all-embracing end-user support organization (at a totally unimaginable cost) that it would make the corporation entirely unviable. Support is extraordinarily expensive even in conventional quantities, and here we're not talking conventional.

    Microsoft is rich merely because they have never provided customer support in the same order of magnitude as the size of their end-user population. Indeed, there aren't enough techies on the planet for them to do this even if they employed every single one, IMO, and this is also why it's virtually unheard-of to run into anyone that has successfully managed to contact their helpdesk (in UK circles, at least). Ask any large traditional software manufacturer (ie. not free or open-source) which their single largest expenditure is if you don't believe me, and then extrapolate to Microsoft proportions taking into account the number of their products.

    The really weird thing though is that people have accepted the situation as the norm now, despite the fact that they wouldn't dream of letting any other manufacturer off the hook in this way. Most odd.

  • Yes and No ... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You are indeed lucky that your NT machines don't crash regularly, but while it might be unusual, I wouldn't consider it isolated.

    It is true that NT can be stable, particularly if your NT server serves a single function and has just the right hardware and just the right software.

    In reality, any server crash is a serious problem, revealing a flaw with the operating system. My real problem with NT isn't the fact that it is unstable in a large number of situations (especially in dual-use situations), but rather that when it is unstable, it is rather consistently unstable.

    If your operating system crashes once a day or once a week, you would think that Microsoft would be able to reproduce the problem and fix it. All operating systems have bugs, and as long as a vendor fixes them, fine, I'm happy. But Microsoft DOESN'T fix them, and a machine that is moderately unstable usually becomes MORE unstable when I apply service packs 1, 2, or 6.

    Back to Oracle. The enterprise database market is certainly an important one, but to face reality, neither NT nor Linux is going to displace Solaris anytime soon ... but NT has had a strong presence in the mid-range and workgroup database server market ... a these are the databases that power 90% of the e-commerce sites out there.

    NT may be stable as a file system, but I have yet to see a NT machine that can run a real database, run a real webserver, and stay up for more than a week.

    Kudos to Oracle for supporting Linux, the ideal operating system for the tens of thousands of e-commerce sites popping up that need a good (but not enterprise class) database and a web server, and need 100% uptimes.

  • Why must the support costs be higher ? Is there any evidence to back up this assertion ?
    Perhaps it is offset by not paying major $$$s for the NT licenses...

    From what I understood in the artical Oracle wasn't just providing technical support for Oracle on Linux but providing technical support for both Oracle and Linux it'self. That can't come cheap.

    Having never bought Oracle I don't know much about the WinNT tech support. Depending on how bad the problems with WinNT are and the support agreements it could be much cheaper or much more expensive to support WinNT. Cheaper if WinNT isn't that bad and they don't support WinNT it'self. More expensive if WinNT is bad and causes lots of problems.

  • Gloat... (Score:1)

    by rde ( 17364 )
    We've reached the stage where, while this news is good, it's no longer earth-shattering. We expect this sort of announcement. It's going to become the norm as more and more people get sick of rebooting every day.
    So I guess for now the only thing to do is... gloat.
    Bwahahahahahaha!
  • I'd been hearing that Oracle on linux wasn't quite ready for big time yet... Has this changed - is it pretty stable now?
    Anyone using it commercially care to comment?
  • I do like reading these articles, every day more and more companies are starting to use Linux, and with a big company like Oracle pushing it, hopefully they'll also start making it better, like Corel did with Wine. Maybe Oracle could work on SMP and RAID, cos they're a corporation who can afford 8 processor systems to do the testing and development on.

    But who knows what will happen, but I think it can only be for the good.

    Iain
  • This is good news for me, especially if Oracle does the same thing in the US. While the place that I work currently is a Sybase shop, we are being told by our corporate headquarters that we will eventually have to move everything to Oracle. Corporate is also already using Linux, so this should make it easier to get Linux into our local shop.

  • Oracle on Linux has been very stable for some time now...
    I've used it since version 8.0.5 and I can say it is really stable...

    The main problems are installation related:
    Oracle expects to be linked against specific versions of libraries (Glibc, Tk libs, etc...) so it can become a problem if your distro hasn't got the good ones...
    For example, you can't install oracle 8i (8.1.5, the last version) on SuSE linux 6.1 because SuSE 6.1 has Glibc 2.0.7 and Oracle wants 2.1.1

    Once you get around these little quirks you can try to crash it... ;-)

    Since I did a demo of Linux (and remote admin via VNC) to the Database guy, my school has moved all the oracle DBs to Linux (from Digital Unix and NT...)

    Quentin
  • It may no longer be earth shattering but it is what I like to hear. I spend my working days mending NT systems and explaining to people that BSODs are not their fault. This could help me, working for the Health service in the UK, by making my bosses think again about "grown up" operating systems.

  • It's one thing to make a port to Linux, it's another thing to encourage your customers to move to Linux. This is quite a breakthough...

    You have to wonder how did Oracle ever convince themselves that converting customers to Linux would be cost effective. The costs of providing the technical support for Linux must be high, higher then the costs of providing WinNT support. This isn't good news for WinNT.

  • Re:oracle on linux (Score:4)

    by DJerman ( 12424 ) <djerman@pobox.com> on Friday November 26, 1999 @06:24AM (#1503407)
    I'd been hearing that Oracle on linux wasn't quite ready for big time yet... Has this changed - is it pretty stable now? Anyone using it commercially care to comment?

    Not quite yet.

    I"m not running it yet on an "official" test box, but the kernel team needs to support real synchronous writes (and IMHO real raw device support) before Oracle on Linux will really be ready to take off. I do however plan to "officially" study the platform when these issues are resolved (and supported by Oracle). Supposedly the 2.4 kernel will have these features. I'll then consider Linux on PC boxen as an option vs NT. It can't really compete Solaris/Sun and Tru64/Compaq, until we get advanced RAID and Fibre Channel controller support. But soon it'll be a contender for relatively low-use servers, like small business servers, development boxes or servers dedicated to a single application.

    To compete with the bigger Unices, we need better multiple processor/NIC support (for throughput in the Mindcraft zone) and drivers for high-end RAID and disk sharing schemes (and raw device support for those). Then we'll probably see a port of Oracle Parallel Server, and Linux will become a contender across the board.

    But it's almost ready to take over the NT market now. I have had some "challenges" with Oracle tuning on NT boxes, due to the odd nature of NT memory usage and (previously) problems with NTFS drivers when the disks are heavily used. Any *ix based solution will make more efficient use of resource dollars, IMHO, if it supports commodity hardware. Since the problems and limitations of NT servers (26 drive letters, etc) sorta limit the high-end applications there, too, Linux doesn't have to go as far to compete in that market. I'll definitely look at the pros and cons for my shop when we get that really-synchronous disk write and Oracle uses it.

  • This is great news for Linux... unfortunately, as somebody has already pointed out, we've basically reached a state where this kind of news is expected, and to be expected to become more frequent as Linux-awareness rises.

    However, this particular incident only shows that Linux is doing well in the server market. NT never managed to be very successful in the server market anyway, though MS has been trying its best to promote it, so it's not that surprising people are beginning to switch from NT to Linux. But what about the desktop market??? It seems that MS still holds the reins in the PC market, and Linux is only barely making its entry there. Yes, we have all those nice companies going Open Source, doing neat stuff like Corel Linux, selling Linux-preinstalled machines and whatnot, but the cold hard fact is that Windows still rules the PC market. AFAIK we haven't heard that much about Linux making an impact in the PC market; most of the big news is in the server domain.

    As a proof (or rather, vague indication) of this, perhaps we could do a poll here on /. on how many people still dual-boots to Windows. I think I can almost predict the results...

  • Well, sometimes people who insist on using Windows for their projects throw money at me, and so I use Windows on their behalf. However, except for those cases, I've been completely Windows-free for years.

    I use MacOS and BeOS for graphics and video, Irix and Linux for everything else. And I'm happy as a clam as long as I don't need to use Windows :-).

    Now, in terms of Windows unfortunately ruling the PC world, of course it does. I liked that Motley Fool article from yesterday. Its key statement in my eyes is that any alternative to an existing dominant system has to find a niche where it can grow more or less undisturbed until it finds critical mass. That niche has been the server.

    Remember how long it took for Windows to completely win over DOS? Even now, I'll bet there are a million or two DOS machines still out there in active use. Linux could eventually dominate in the same way, slowly but surely.

    It's happening; just have patience.

    D

    ----
  • your box is most likely stable because it is only a simple fileserver.

    install a web server, sql server or proxy server on it and see how it fares...

    i hate it. i had to go on site *4* (yep, count em) times yesterday because a particular client's machine kept dropping its connection, and of course MS-DNS server that they were using does not recover.. ever. ended up just disabling DNS on that machine.. was just running it as a cache.. its clients were using socks anyway..

    ms proxy often has to be restarted, sometimes it locks up solid and you have to reboot the box... administrator logged in, try to kill it "sorry permission denied". wtf? :P


    smash (i hate it, i hate it i hate it...)

    ps.. i work in an isp. we do not personally use NT for anything important, other than firewalled office print/file server... our ISP network is 75% linux, 25% solaris :)

  • NT.... (Score:3)

    by Haven ( 34895 ) on Friday November 26, 1999 @06:09AM (#1503411) Homepage Journal
    I work as a network administrator, and I had 3 NT 4.0 Enterprise servers doing file and print services sitting in my office (its more like a big room, but its mine). Everyday the second server (FP_23) in the line would crash. You could set your watch to this peice of crap. One day I stayed after work for 3 hours and installed linux and samba on it (I backed up all the data before). I configured all the services and set it up to look exactly like the old NT box. The next morning when I came back to work, it was still up.... a miracle.

    I have been using linux / samba on that server for 2 months now and no one has noticed anything.

    Anyway... all I'm saying is that companies don't know how streamless and unnoticable the difference is between a *nix box with samba, and an NT box when its doing file and printing services. Its especially cheaper if you are running linux. You could also save money on newer hardware since I found that samba boxes are alot faster than NT.

  • Before anybody reads too much into this, read all of the article--especially the last paragraph. How many Oracle development partners are there moving customers to Linux?

    One.

    So maybe it isn't time for the party hats and noisemakers quite yet. You have to understand the context of this kind of announcement: third-party software vendors in Japan aren't a major force. Companies tend to be highly integrated--they do their own IT work. If they outsource work, they'll outsource it to a major company (typically a major American company--Americans are viewed as being the most technologically advanced by the Japanese). The people hiring the one Oracle Linux partner (and the two others to sign up shortly) are teensy businesses.

    When Sumitomo, Mitsubishi, NEC, Matsushita, or Toyota embrace Oracle on Linux then you can get (and should be) impressed.

  • [humor] I heard that oracle is working pretty good on linux now but you have to be 32 years old and balding with 4 kids and a golden retriever to use it. Thats according to their EULA. [/humor]
  • Oracle on Linux has been very stable for some time now... I've used it since version 8.0.5 and I can say it is really stable... The main problems are installation related: [...]

    The only problem I have is that architecturally, Linux doesn't allow synchronous writes (you can ask for them, but they're not really synchronous), so you can possibly lose committed records which would be recoverable on other systems. It's not really a problem for development or low-criticality environments, but for e-commerce or other high-liability environments it's a serious problem. You can take the order and forget to ship if the power goes off or the motherboard blows before the disk write. Fortunately the kernel guys seem to be working on it...

  • It is impressive, I was at Oracle Openworld last week and Oracle has made Linux a Tier1 platform. Which means, Solaris, HPUX, Linux and NT are the first to be released platforms. In a panel discussion I attended, Oracle is porting ALL of its ERP and tools to Linux. So Larry and crew are taking the Linux thing very serious.

    Joe
  • Gurlia asked:
    As a proof (or rather, vague indication) of this, perhaps we could do a poll here on /. on how many people still dual-boots to Windows. I think I can almost predict the results...
    Dual-boot to Windows? No, I've actually never done that. I think my computer at the house still has boot manager on it and will dual-boot OS/2, but not Windows. My computer at my day job runs Windows-95 and only Windows-95, (it's a Compaq Presario) but I've got an X server and CRT running on it, and four or so servers on which I to play Quake, so why would I need to dual-boot?
  • This is very nice ... in much of the market Oracle is the default choice of DB these days for heavy duty applications ... as such increased Linux support by Oracle is a key inidicator that that Linux will continue to grow in the server market ... for the most part, this is probably at the expense of NT ...

    On a side note: Does anybody know if Oracle contributes any code (or actually, any projects like raw device DB access or other stuff)? I'm assuming they're at least contributing bug fixes but I'm hoping it's more (I just don't know). They have a lot of know-how and could potentially contribute some really cool stuff ...

  • I'm not sure why your company would want to move to Oracle.

    They are doing it in the name of 'standardization'. That is what corporate uses, so that is what we have to move to. We are just one division in a huge company (about 13% or so of the employees of the whole corp). Some of our other divisions are using DB2 or Informix and they will probably have to change to Oracle as well.

    Sybase on Linux rocks. Of course Sybase doesn't have the scalability or options that Oracle does, but for mid-ranged databases and even small enterprise databases Sybase can't be beat.

    We have everything from tiny databases to huge enterprise databases, so scalability and wide platform level support (Solaris, AIX, HP/UX, Linux and (blech) NT) is important. Not that I think that Sybase fares that badly in most cases, but the perception is that Oracle is better on the very high end, and with PHB's perception is often the most important thing.

  • Re:But how about desktop penetration? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think *how often* people dual-boot would be more interesting. I boot into Windows on average about twice a month now, which is WAY down from how much I used to do it. Things like SB Live drivers, KDE 1.1.2 (I plan to re-evaluate GNOME soon too - I'm sure it's not as awful as 1.0 anymore), and 3D support are making Linux more and more "livable". WINE even runs the proprietary login program for my cable modem. Once Mozilla's ready as a daily browser (M11 is very close) I'll be very happy with my Linux desktop experience.

  • Ah, Larry! He a) worships Japan, b) hates Microsoft with a passion, and c) runs Oracle. He must have been WAITING for this....
  • Well, I must second John Murdoch's post.
    Normally, when a collar is employed, he enters a
    clan and everything is the matter of honour. I
    can barely imagine someone at IT dept. who had
    approved NT over UNIX 10 years ago now is taking
    his word back and adopting Linux, even if it comes
    from Whatever-Gaijin Japan. Loosing his face.... Impossiburu....
    This makes a `vertical' barrier. Also, clans are allied with some clans and
    fighting with others. Allies' ablilty to adopt the said innovation :) makes `horizontal' barrier.
    Of course, it can be impressive from the tech's point of view, but I suspect that Oracle is just getting its press.... Let's see if Big Boys jump in the game....

  • "Everyday the second server (FP_23) in the line would crash."

    "I have been using linux / samba on that server for 2 months now and no one has noticed anything."

    To be sure that non one EVER notice anything, create a script that shutdown Samba once in a while and restart it after a delay. ;)

    So they will attribute it to NT's habitual crash and won't ever look after it, but you you won't have to touch it, otherwise they may want to know why it is stable all in a sudden and ask you to reinstall NT... oups, this was valid 3 years ago when everybody was clueless about Linux ;)

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