BusinessWeek is reporting that Oracle is looking to buy more open source companies. Specifically they mention JBoss, Zend and Sleepycat. Nothing official has been announced yet, but keep in mind that it was only a few months ago when Oracle bought the company behind InnoDB (Innobase).
All of these moves prompt one question, will Oracle start to play hard ball with these companies other database clients? Zend for instance has been pushing for more DB2 (IBM‘s database server), if Oracle were to own Zend would this trend stop? Would Oracle direct these three companies to focus resources on making their products work best with the Oracle database and let the community worry about supporting everyone else?
Although not as popular as InnoDB, the Berkeley DB from Sleepycat is also a supported storage back end for MySQL. On top of that, PHP (which is what Zend works on) is probably the most commonly used language to access MySQL databases. If I were the MySQL folks I’d really have to wonder if Oracle is trying to knock you out by buying up everything around you.
Makes me glad that there is no one specific company behind the Apache web server, other wise that would be a likely purchase target as well. Perhaps the closest thing to an Apache company would be Covalent. Going down the stack leads us to Red Hat as the next likely target. Not only would this get them an operating system (OS) of their own, they would get all of the other companies and technologies that Red Hat has acquired over the years.
I don’t know if either of these companies (Covalent and Red Hat) would be willing to sell to Oracle, but if Oracle could pull that off they’d have everything (assuming they also pick up JBoss, Zend and Sleepycat) to offer a real physical database server. I’m imagining something along the lines of the Google Search Appliance (GSA). Perhaps 2007 will be the year of the Oracle Database Appliance (ODA)?
An ODA would of course have Oracle database software running on it, but on top of that would have a web based admin served via the Apache web server and written in PHP or Java. All sorts of PHP and Java hooks would already be in place and available on the ODA. And in true Oracle form it would cost an arm and a leg, based on the number of CPUs and RAM you wanted to have in the system 🙂 Entry level ODA for say $25,000 per year?