Open source, it’s said, is an inevitable force and closed-sourcers who resist will fail. If that’s true, why did the founder of the world’s default big-data processing framework – Doug Cutting, creator of the Google MapReduce-inspired Hadoop used by Amazon.com, Facebook and Yahoo! – have so much to fear from Oracle and Microsoft before they [...]
Sparks have flown between aging pioneers and big-data hipsters as NoSQL databases have dumped feature and language properties found in relational forerunners from companies like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, deemed unsuited to Facebook, Twitter, Google and others. The pendulum is starting to swing back, though, with MongoDB going SQLish here.
Oracle last summer sued Google, claiming its popular Android smart-phone operating system violates patents it owns in Java. Now, Oracle’s turned its lawyers on the non-profit, open-source group Apache Software Foundation part of whose Project Harmony is used by Android. As I write here, the wording of an Oracle subpoena of Apache reveals Larry Ellison’s [...]
Before Web 2.0 and cloud computing, Java application servers were the future for serving up software online and had matured into cushy million-dollar franchises owned by IBM, Oracle and Red Hat. Application servers are built using Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE), but this has languished for years in industry deadlock and apathy while the baton [...]
Oracle’s $5.6bn acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010 didn’t just deliver the software giant a hardware empire, it secured control over one of the planet’s most popular programming languages – Java. And Oracle wasn’t about to surrender control based on some idealistic notions of freedom – no matter what it had once said when Sun [...]
Did the once-mighty Sun Microsystems go too far, putting community ahead of shareholders by giving away too much of its software? Founder and former CEO Scott McNealy thinks it might. I talked to McNealy, here, about lessons learned and how Sun’s new owner Larry Ellison can dodge death by open source.
A handy tip off and some sharp follow-up, and 24 hours after I wrote how Oracle was claiming trademark rights on popular open-source project Hudson, to retain the Hudson brand, and I broke the news that not only does Oracle not own the name but it’s scrambling fast to claim it. You can read more [...]
Michael Stonebraker seized on the thinking of an IBM mathematician 40 years ago and turned it into the multi-billion-dollar relational-database industry dominated by Oracle, Microsoft and – yes – IBM. With his latest venture SciDB, this academic, engineer and serial entrepreneur is preparing to go beyond the world of relational he helped create. I spoke [...]
Oracle consultants delivering a £13.2m UK university system for thousands of students and teachers based on its own software have been replaced by ‘external experts’ making Oracle the second lead to be removed from this flagship project. I unearthed the exclusive here.
A major re-organization of Microsoft’s $14bn sever and tools business is designed to quickly find ways of making money from cloud computing, protect the existing Windows Server business from cannibalization, and respond to Oracle, VMware and Linux. Read my exclusive here.
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