We live in interesting times
Oracle’s Ellison girded investors for an open-source push at a Feb. 8 conference in Santa Monica, Calif., saying, “We are moving aggressively into open source. We are embracing it. We are not going to fight this trend. We think if we’re clever, we can make it work to our advantage.”
Ellison wants to become businesses’ most important software provider and turn customers into one-stop-shop subscribers. Subscriptions are a huge shift from a model where the name of the game is getting huge upfront payments from corporate customers. In the case of open-source and on-demand software, companies pay little to nothing upfront, instead paying a monthly fee for hosting, support, or maintenance.
Boy, this is going to be interesting. I can’t decide what will be more so: how this will affect the balance among big vendors, or how the open source community will react. Just, wow. The only thing I dare to venture is that I won’t read the Slashdot comments on this one.
Oracle. Who knew?
Via Jonah Harris.