Red Hat exec states Oracle is not an open source company

It’s been stated that Oracle is now the industry’s most powerful open source vendor, but do not tell that to Red Hat executives, who state Oracle doesn’t even qualify as an open source company.

When Oracle purchased Sun, controller of Java, MySQL, and OpenSolaris, Gartner analyst George Weiss argued that the acquisition made Oracle “the most powerful open source vendor in the market today, bar none.”

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As distributor of the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat takes exception to that kind of talk. Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat, stated in a new interview that he doesn’t even think about Oracle to be an open source vendor and argued that even Sun was not as open as Red Hat.

“I would not even think about calling them an open source company at all,” Cormier said. “When you are making a choice as a company on what is open and what is closed then your customers suffer.”

Sun sometimes held back “the good stuff” from the open source community in developing MySQL, making important contributions to the software proprietary, Cormier said. The major open source software products controlled by Sun will remain in the public domain, but Cormier said, “Open is not just seeing the code. Open is also having a community of developers. OpenSolaris is not open. There is no community other than Sun people developing Solaris.”

“There are pieces [of Oracle] that are open,” Cormier continued. “But what we do, is open everything. We do not state ‘here’s this part of the operating system that is open, but this other part is closed.’”

Oracle’s buy of Sun has caused blended feelings in the open source world. Sun’s chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, left the company after the acquisition, but some analysts have argued that open source could thrive under Oracle, because it is more financially stable than Sun was.

One key area to watch is the Java Community Process, which helps dictate the future of Java by developing new technology specifications and reference implementations.

Cormier stated he is not too worried about Oracle’s newfound influence over Java development.

“The jury’s still out on how it’s going to be managed,” he said. “We’re all watching. We’re feverishly in our development cycle right now, as we always have been.”

Cormier discussed several other open source topics related to cloud computing and virtualization. Amazon runs its Elastic Compute Cloud with Red Hat’s version of the Xen hypervisor, while IBM is building a test-and-development cloud service with Red Hat’s version of KVM (kernel-based virtual machine).

Linux has a strong foothold in the cloud computing market, but there are still questions about which hypervisor will become the open source platform of choice in the cloud. Red Hat is coming out strongly behind KVM, which is embedded in the Linux kernel. Cormier argues that running Xen with Linux is basically like running two operating systems stacked on top of one another, and needlessly complicated.

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Red Hat exec states Oracle is not an open source company

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