In which Archaeogeek checks the date in case it’s April Fools
Comments(2) Thanks to the Linfiniti Geo Blog, we get what has to be the most unintentionally hilarious article ever, about Oracle Xe.
It’s an open source blogger’s dream post (all quotations are direct from the article). We get fear-mongering about open source “maintenance, support, and security headaches”. We get limitations built in, ostensibly to make it “easy to install”. We get accidental admissions that “if you can reduce your EE license costs by even a single CPU, you’ve made your effort worthwhile”, and the crazy notion that we should “reduce the load on enterprise hardware” by installing databases on desktops instead. We do, however, get “A New Type of Support: The Community”, but beware, because “you won’t be able to create a Technical Assistance Request (TAR) for XE issues regardless of the support contract you have”.
It’s worth checking out some other posts by the same author, in particular this comparison between Oracle 10, PostgreSQL and MySQL, where he admitted that he was “strongly biased towards Oracle and fully expected no real competition”, and then found that PostgreSQL came out tops in his tests. Oh well, props to him for publishing it, I guess!
OK, OK, these articles were written in 2006 and 2005 respectively, and while pointing out the unintentional absurdity of this mindset is fun, it’s not big and it’s not clever. There are serious points to take away here. This article unintentionally highlights all the reasons why you should avoid the proprietary software model, like the need to put limitations in the products you want to give away for free so you can justify selling the fully featured versions at a much higher price. At the same time that it implies all sorts of bad things will happen with open source, it talks about a community for support (though not for real technical support, because that’s one of the limitations of their free product). We (in the open source community) can see that this model is broken, and that we have better products, better support, better community. As has been said elsewhere, what happens when everyone else wises up to this?
Aw, that’s a bit harsh, isn’t it, especially when our own government ministers can’t seem to tell the difference between open-source and proprietary software? I agree that the article’s author is pretty stupid to pretend Oracle XE is anything other than a proprietary solution. However, its licence does allow it to be used in much the same way as many OS databases are used. Obviously, Oracle are aiming XE at the people who might start out with MySQL e.g. for a prototype web application, but then consider upgrading to a commercial RDBMS as their application matures. The practical limitations on Oracle XE (limit on processors, databse size etc) may not be much of a problem for a prototype app, while the easy upward compatibility might well prove especially tempting to people who already have an investment in Oracle at the enterprise level. And the free support from other users via Oracle TechNet forums is generally excellent and easily on a par with the best OS support forums. Oracle XE is also a great way for developers to play with an easy-to-install and reasonably functional version of Oracle (includes APEX, PL/SQL, Oracle Locator but not Spatial, and so on) free of charge. Oracle XE is a perfectly valid choice for some purposes, but it’s clearly not an open-source solution, just as you say. So I’d say it’s not broken, just differently functional…
And another thing… I don’t know why the article is making such a fuss about nasty old open-source, when Oracle has been busy pushing its open-source compatibility in many areas for years, and the same page includes links to lots of Oracle articles and software relating to open-source-ish things like Linux, PHP and Java. Maybe Lewis R. Cunningham just needs to get with the program…