[Info-vax] Should Oracle buy OpenVMS?

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <49ee7768$0$90272$14726298 at news.sunsite.dk>,
	Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> writes:
> Alan Winston - SSRL Central Computing wrote:
>> In article <49ee73b7$0$90266$14726298 at news.sunsite.dk>, =?ISO-8859-15?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?= <arne at vajhoej.dk> writes:
>>> http://money.cnn.com/2009/04/20/markets/thebuzz/index.htm?postversion=2009042014
>>>
>>> has some numbers: SW sale is 600 M$ out of 12.4 B$ total sale.
>>>
>>> You do not pay 7.4 B$ to acquire 600 M$ in annual sale. They
>>> want the server business.
>> 
>> Although they talk about Java being their most important software acquisition
>> ever.
> 
> They now own the Java trademarks and then can speed up Java development
> (like Java SE 7 !).
> 
> Which is important for a lot of their existing business.
> 
> But that is more defensive than offensive play.
> 
> I don't think they would that type of money for just that.
> 
>>> And besides MySQL does not compete that much with Oracle DB.
>>> Different segments.
>> 
>> I'd heard it was pushing up into the high-end web space, although presumably
>> more for things like high-speed display of data (news aggregation, etc) than
>> for transaction-dependent things directly involving money.
> 
> MySQL show up a lot pf places. It is actually an OK database.

Database experts would likely disagree.  Thankfully, we dropped it here
in favor of Postgres.  Specifically because it lacked certain features
of real databases that needed to be taught and couldn't with MySQL.
We no longer even offer it as an option for student or faculty work.

> 
> But I still believe that Oracle DB is more competing with
> IBM DB2 and MS SQLServer where the big money are.

Like everything else in this business the line between the low end
and the high end is blurring more and more every day.  Are we really
that far from when one of these open source databases reaches the point
of actually doing what Oracle does and starting to eat into its core
business niche?

bill

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>