Larry Ellison, head of Oracle, says:

"Open source becomes successful when major industrial corporations invest heavily in that open source project," Ellison said at a Tokyo news conference. "Every open source product that has become tremendously successful became successful because of huge dollar investments from commercial IT operations like IBM and Intel and Oracle and others," he said.

He highlighted his own company's work in developing and promoting Linux, and said the operating system would not have enjoyed the success that it has without vendor backing.

"There's a lot of romantic notions about open source," Ellison said. "That just from the air [? sic] these developers contribute and don't charge. Let me tell you the names of the companies that developed Linux: IBM, Intel, Oracle -- not a community of people who think everything should be free. Open source is not a communist movement."

Some analysts have credited Linux 's success to support from big vendors, notably IBM's decision in 2000 to invest US$1 billion in the operating system. Still, Ellison's remarks are sure to rile the open-source community, which will point to open-source programs that became widely used on the Internet under their own steam, such as the Apache Web server.

Oracle has more developers working on Linux than Red Hat, according to Ellison. It's work has included developing a clustered file system for Linux, he noted. Oracle also holds a majority stake in Tokyo-based Miracle Linux, which created the Asianux Linux distribution with companies in South Korea and China.

There is nothing wrong with such contests; they are the stuff of capitalism and progress. But the government should not be enlisted on either side, and those who want to use the government to promote their model are simple rent-seekers.

posted by James DeLong @ 9:19 AM | Software

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment | Post a Comment(0)