Sunday, October 12, 2008

 

More James McGovern Q and A

Mark Wilcox wants to understand how oracle trails Microsoft in open source contributions. Maybe, if I share some perspectives he didn't noodle, he will become savage in closing the gap...



Let's look at one of mark's quotes: Let's take a step back here. Sun did not open-source LDAP :). They have an open-source project that wrote from scratch an open-source ,storage-based LDAP server in Java. which says that Sun appreciates that open source is not just about dumping dead products on the market, but understands that participating in a larger community has immense value. Sun showed leadership in allowing the community to make the choice of how the product will evolve without the overhead of sales folks filtering out ideas before they reach product managers. Now, let's compare this line of thinking to Mark's comment: At the moment we are still able to grow the adoption of OVD (and OID), are able to improve upon the core product via customer feedback and have a plug-in API that allows for customers (whether themselves, partners or Oracle consulting) to extend the product to meet their needs - so I don't sense a valid reason to open-source OVD.. Does anyone see a difference in openness?

Here is another quote from Mark: Microsoft has produced open specifications, a few examples and started the Information Card Foundation (which we are a member of) to help drive adoption of Information Cards. I would argue we are on the same path on IGF via Open Liberty. Of course, he conveniently misses talking about the fact that Microsoft also funded implementations of information cards for platforms such as PHP and Java, languages obviously non-Microsoft. So, can we expect Oracle to fund IGF libraries for non-Oracle languages such as Smalltalk, Ruby on Rails and .NET?

Mark also previously blogged on How Oracle can help you write more secure code. I wonder if he is familar with the Open Web Application Security Project? Notice that Microsoft and IBM are sponsors? Notice that Oracle is not...






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