In the proprietary domain [LWN.net]

In the proprietary domain

Posted Jan 30, 2010 17:58 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: In the proprietary domain by man_ls
Parent article: Oracle will boost MySQL, release Cloud Office suite (Computerworld)

Yeah, but it's the thing you've got to work with day to day that you
really hate. My workplace is moving off suns even faster than we already
were, simply because it is not healthy to have one giant supplier that you
get everything from.

to post comments

Funny

Posted Jan 30, 2010 18:03 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (2 responses)

So the "full software stack" strategy is not working for you? Nor the new "full hardware + software stack" strategy? :D

Funny

Posted Jan 30, 2010 18:59 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

It's great! It means that if your supplier wants to change anything all
you can say is 'yes master, can we have some more?' because you can't
migrate off their stuff because you rely on them for these *other* things
as well... the real problem here is that Oracle is proprietary, of course.
You don't get this sort of lockin with PostgreSQL.

Funny

Posted Jan 30, 2010 20:10 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

the real problem here is that Oracle is proprietary, of course.

It's not the only problem, I think. Lock-in is inevitable when you rely on some piece of equipment and it is not standard. For example, you can rely on a J2EE server but the transition to another will be mostly painless. Same with standard SQL (if standard SQL was used by anyone). But if you use the proprietary extensions of your DB (be it open source or not) then it will be very hard to migrate any large software system. So for instance, migrating from MySQL to Oracle or viceversa can be near impossible even if they (now) come from the same vendor.

This situation is quite bad for the customer and the industry in general, but very profitable to the vendor. I had never thought of the implications of having just one provider for everything, but you are right, it sounds scary. In fact it's back to the Apollo workstations of the 80s before Sun started building standard Unix machines. What irony, Sun's history ends just as it started.