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Oracle loves open source, except when the database giant hates it, of course. Most of the time it seems to hate open source, judging by its recent lobbying of the Federal government against it.

Yes, Oracle recently stepped up its support for Kubernetes by joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF); Yes, it has long supported (and contributed code to) Linux; Yes, Oracle has also chosen open Java — donating Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation.

Looks love open source oracle, however, has been lobbying the government to consider this view, “from the point of view of cost, need not calculate can prove it is not necessary to use open source software, because of its support costs, and give up feature, function, automation and safety brought about by the opportunity cost down any assumption of cost savings.”

Oracle senior Vice President Kenneth Glueck made the case in a letter to Christopher Liddell, the former Microsoft CHIEF financial officer who now heads Trump’s American Technology Council.

The US government is seeking input on its IT modernisation plans. Other IT companies that wrote back to Liddell included AT&T, Cisco, Microsoft and VMware.

In other words, oracle wants us to believe that open source leads to higher costs and less secure and incomplete software, according to the letter. In addition, Oracle argues that the private sector is failing because of the use of open source software. But it seems to forget that much of today’s leading infrastructure, big data and mobile software is open source. Be specific!

Oracle would be better off following Microsoft’s path than taking the counterproductive detour that would expose its own selfish stupidity. In the past, Microsoft has been on both sides of open source, supporting it while simultaneously attacking it. Only later, under CEO Satya Nadella, did Microsoft realize that it could embrace open source wholeheartedly, and its financial performance rose as a result of its commitment to open source. In fact, Oracle has a lot to learn from Microsoft’s approach.

I love you. You’re perfect. But that has changed

Oracle has never been particularly enthusiastic about open source, but rather ambivalent. As Larry Ellison, its founder, puts it, Oracle is a profit-seeking business, not a peace-loving charity. In that sense, oracle, if it chooses to embrace open source, is doing so in the same way as any other commercial company.

But few companies have been as outspoken as Oracle on the subject of open source in the enterprise. Ellison famously told the Financial Times back in 2006 that “if an open source product gets good enough, it’s easy, we take it and use it.” So, he added, the beauty of open source is that no one can really own it — companies like Oracle can freely use it for free, add it to our own products, and then charge for it by providing support services, which is what we’re going to do.

“So open source is not disruptive per se — you have to find where you can add value. Once open source is good enough, competing with it is pretty stupid… We don’t have to be the enemy of open source, we have to know how to use open source.”

It doesn’t sound like “use” is all right. While Oracle doesn’t make the top 10 corporate contributors to the Linux kernel, it does earn a respectable 12th place, which helps it have enough influence over the platform to easily build its IaaS solutions on Linux (and virtualization solutions on Xen). Oracle has also successfully continued to expand MySQL’s reach in the industry, improving it both as a product and as a business. As for Kubernetes, Oracle’s decision to join CNCF also came with a profit and loss condition. “CNCF technologies such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, gRPC, and OpenTracing are key parts of our own and customers’ development tool chains,” said Mark Cavage, Vice president of software development at Oracle.

One might think that Oracle has been pretty thorough about “leveraging” open source.

This is the kind of legitimate exploitation that even free software advocate Richard Stallman loves (or at least tolerates). But when it comes to lobbying the government, Oracle looks more like Mr Hyde than Dr Jekyll, the American marvel villain.

Lies, damn lies, and Oracle lobbying

The current US President has a lot of problems (well, a lot of problems), but his decision to continue the Obama-era support for IT modernization is commendable. Recently, the Trump White House asked for feedback on how best to continuously improve government IT. Oracle’s response is “high comedy.”

As TechDirt’s Mike Masnick concluded, “Oracle’s recent moves are aimed at opposing the federal government’s use of open source technology and the hiring of Silicon Valley employees to help build more modern systems. Oracle would obviously prefer the government to just give it a lot of money.” Oracle knows how to make big money. As such, its feedback is not surprising.

What is surprising is the brazen manner with which it has taken this position. As Masnick points out, the disdain that Oracle has shown in its submissions about IT modernization is unusual. Why do you say so? Because Oracle strongly contradicts what it says publicly on other forums about open source and innovation. On top of that, in the increasingly software – and data-driven world as we know it, Oracle is deeply at odds with the recipe for success that is crucial to competitive differentiating advantage.

Take, for example, Oracle’s contention that strong IT development expertise is not the key to successful modernization efforts.

In today’s “software is eating the world” reality, Oracle clearly sees THE CIO as the buyer, not the executor. The most important skill for ciOs today is to carefully compete and evaluate commercial alternatives to reap the benefits of large-scale innovation, and then effectively manage the implementation of those technologies.

Although oracle’s idea makes sense – each item should not be, must be always support for one-off custom items, but if think CIO (CIO) whether the government CIO or other industries need to put the money to the supplier’s bank account, that work is done very well, this is too amazing.

Indeed, as Masnick points out, if IT hadn’t been for Oracle’s failure, USDS might not even have existed. USDS was created as a result of an emergency hiring of top Internet engineers to fix the healthCare. gov meltdown. Remember, oracle’s technology was largely to blame for the crash.

In short, blindly funding Oracle and other big-name vendors runs counter to the idea of IT modernization.

In its reply to Liddell, Oracle continued its fine (and I mean silly and false) rhetoric about the rapid decline in the use of open source software in the private sector. In fact, this is completely untrue, but Oracle’s willingness to say so is courageous. Take a look at some of the biggest names in big data (Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, etc.), mobile (Android), application development (Kubernetes, Docker), and machine learning/ai (TensorFlow, MxNet). Contrast that with Oracle’s statements and one conclusion is that Oracle thinks its audience, the CIO, is incredibly stupid.

Then Oracle issued its half-truth statement that “from a cost point of view, no calculation is needed to justify the use of open source software.” Why is that? “Because the support costs, plus the opportunity costs of giving up features, functionality, automation, and security outweigh any assumed cost savings.” I guess that’s why Oracle doesn’t use any open source technologies like Linux and Kubernetes in its services.

Aha!

This supplier used to be known as “Satan.”

The point is, Oracle doesn’t need to do this, and it shouldn’t (and in its own good). After all, we only have to look at Microsoft’s experience to see how this will end.

Remember when Microsoft wanted us to “know the truth about Linux”? It is now a significant contributor to Linux; Remember when Microsoft told us open source was a cancer and anti-American? It is now actively contributing code to various open source projects, some of them self-initiated, and constantly telling the world that “Microsoft loves open source”. Of course, Microsoft loves open source for the same reasons that any company does, because it generates a lot of revenue from developers wanting to build applications on Azure that use a lot of open source components. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Would Microsoft prefer to see government IT departments buy SQL Server instead of using open source PostgreSQL? The answer is yes. But can you find even a single line of “open source is bad” in Microsoft’s response letter to Trump’s executive order? Why is that? Because Microsoft understands that open source is a friend and not an enemy, it has learned how to make money from it.

In short, Microsoft is no longer resistant to open source. It can compete with open source at the product level while choosing to embrace open source at the project level, which helps drive its overall product and business strategy forward. Oracle doesn’t do nearly enough of this. It’s still stuck in the same situation Microsoft faced a decade ago.

Oracle, it’s time to think rationally. Lobbying against open source seems disingenuous for a company that makes great software and recognizes that it increasingly needs to rely on it to do so. Oracle needs to learn from Microsoft and stop worrying about open source and start loving it. That was a big factor in Microsoft’s comeback, and perhaps oracle’s.

Translated from The Register