[Info-vax] Should Oracle buy OpenVMS?

[John Smith (not the one @ HP)]

"Bill Gunshannon" <billg999 at cs.uofs.edu> wrote in message 
news:758gb4F16p9dlU7 at mid.individual.net...
> 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


Not sure where it fall price-wise or capability-wise but there seems to be 
some reasonable amount of steam pushing Postgres Plus forward these days 
(Postgres + Oracle extensions) to poach business from Oracle.

This is a paid commercial extension of Postgres.

www.enterprisedb.com