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Mozilla The Internet Linux Business

Oracle Embraces Mozilla 207

Posted by CowboyNeal from the databases-and-web-browsers-living-together dept.
kiggs writes "According to this article from eWeek, Oracle Corp. is ready to extend its 'Linux Everywhere' campaign to client systems. At next week's LinuxWorld in New York, Oracle will announce that it will enable the Mozilla open-source Web browser to run Oracle applications in the coming year. Dave Dargo, vice president of Oracle's Linux Program Office and the Performance Engineering team within its Platform Technologies Division, says that Oracle will look to expand its 1.5-year-old Linux support program by supporting Linux not just as a server but as a client."
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Oracle Embraces Mozilla More

Oracle Embraces Mozilla

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  • Whats wrong with IE? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:30AM (#8006914)
    What is wrong with IE? Most used, most reliable, fastest, and most innovotive browser around.

    Don't bother with these other strange browsers, we don't need them, and don't waste YOUR time.

    IF it wasnt for MS, we wouldn't be using the web today, because PCs would still be very difficult to use and there would be no software.

    Thank you bill Gates, we ALL owe you a beer.

    • Re:Whats wrong with Proprietary Everything (Score:5, Interesting)

      by xtermin8 ( 719661 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:11AM (#8007128)
      There's actually a shred of wisdom in the poster's wit. If it weren't for a single company dominating PC software, there would be a lot less motivation to find an open source alternatives. Without Microsoft, the choice was (and probably still would be) between several crappy closed source software venders. It is because of MS's predatory and evil ways the Linux has become the alternative of choice. And maybe Bill will drown in all that free beer!
      • And maybe Bill will drown in all that free beer!

        <rms>No, no, you're missing the point. It's about free speech, not free beer. Why can't you stupid GNU/Linux people ever understand that? Half the time you don't even put the GNU before Linux. Just you wait, in only ten years HURD will be an almost-usable kernel and you'll see. YOU'LL SEE!!</rms>
      • If it weren't for a single company dominating PC software, there would be a lot less motivation to find an open source alternatives. Without Microsoft, the choice was (and probably still would be) between several crappy closed source software venders.

        The whole FSF, and BSD/MIT licenses were up well before M$FT was even a big player. It was a time when there were a lot of unix players. GNU has its origins "GNU's not Unix" S

      • If you look at the real world:

        • The GNU project was founded when MS was still a small and pretty insignificant player. Also in the beginning GNU didn't even try to be a competition to MS
        • Linux was created because of the shortcomings of Minix, MS had nothing to do with it
        • Apache was created before IIS. D'oh!

        Microsoft has nothing to do with motivating open source.

        • Microsoft has nothing to do with motivating open source.

          That's a pretty naive statement. Sure GNU and free software was around, but how many people and companies now support OSS because of their disdain toward MS? The new licensing scheme released by MS is pushing even more people into the OSS camp and thus motivating them.

          I believe it is a yin and yang type of thing. Without the single big closed source company driving people away, OSS may never have gotten the critical mass of users that it has toda
      • actually, it was the unix wars that sprung forth the opensource movement, and if it werent microsoft, it would be IBM or Apple.

        and people would still like free stuff.
        • Actually it was the IBM mainframe environment plus the early stages of UNIX.....

          In the earlier IBM mainframe days the source code for most of the OS was published, so that device drivers etc. could be written. And this were commonly shated. Not sure if that still happens.

          And the early work on UNIX was always distributed as source, with the expectation that others could contribute.

          Actually prior to Bill Gates etc, publication of the source of the OS was relatively normal, as was the sharing of developme

      • If it weren't for a single company dominating PC software, there would be a lot less motivation to find an open source alternatives.


        This is like saying we should be glad about 9/11 as it led to better airline security. Sheesh.

    • Re:Whats wrong with IE? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17, 2004 @12:06PM (#8007434)
      Thank you bill Gates, we ALL owe you a beer.

      MORE small print in the EULA?

  • Don't they get it? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:32AM (#8006923)
    It should have had worked since beginning (unless there's some catastrophic bug in mozilla). A web page that requires some specific browser is hopelessly broken by my definition.

    • Maybe it is not about browsing.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by GerardM ( 535367 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:43AM (#8006982)
      When you want to do some clever stuff, you do not want to restrict yourself to HTML so you do not necessaraly want to use *any* browser. With the Mozilla technology they have a platform that has implementations on many platforms.

      So I think they get it and it is less browser technology than presentation technology that they find in Mozilla

    • Re:Don't they get it? (Score:5, Informative)

      by LDoggg_ ( 659725 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:39AM (#8007279) Homepage
      A web page that requires some specific browser is hopelessly broken by my definition.

      Oracle's web pages do not require a specific browser, their applications do.
      The article was not very clear on this.

      Oracle does have some web applications (server-side code generating dynamic html pages), like their self-serivce stuff and the e-commerce iStores product.
      However, what most of us that use Oracle applications consider to be the "applictions" are the business applictions.
      These are things like accounting AR/AP, orders, inventory, HR, GL, etc. This stuff already uses client side Java/swing, presumably to make it a cross-platform product.
      The problem is that up until now these applications use a custom Java virtual machine called Jinitiator to launch, and it only works on IE.

      If they intend to have this stuff run on Linux, then they need to either port Jinitiator, of fix the apps so they can use a standard JVM.
      The article was rather vague on which route they are taking.

      • Re:Don't they get it? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17, 2004 @01:07PM (#8007750)
        Your statements are not completely true. What the announcement means is "official certification" of Mozilla across all of Oracle's web-based products. But many of these products work well with Mozilla because a lot of developers do test with Mozilla and because Mozilla's standards compliance makes it easy to build apps for it.

        JInitiator (even the pre-Mozilla versions) work like a charm on Mozilla - I use it day in and day out. Ofcourse the old installers don't recognize Mozilla (they only recognize IE and Netscape 4.x) but on Windows you can copy the plugin DLLs to your Mozilla plugins directory. Obviously we don't want to suggest these "hacks" to customers and so this would be an example where we improve the installer to do the right thing and place the seal of Oracle support. This is true even on Linux and Solaris because at it's core JInitiator is Java-based.

        The newer self-service applications built in the past three years all work on Mozilla. They are built with UIX [oracle.com] which elminates all the raw HTML coding from our Apps developers. The core technology team ensures compliance across all browsers including Mozilla. Just FYI this also helps us support a host of PDAs and smartphones. The same is true for ADF [oracle.com] which is simply the next generation of UIX and related tools.

        Disclaimer: I work at Oracle in the applications technologies division but these statements are mine and do not reflect Oracle's position. Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.

        • Re:Don't they get it? (Score:2, Interesting)

          by LDoggg_ ( 659725 )
          This is true even on Linux and Solaris because at it's core JInitiator is Java-based.

          Care to give the linux version of the hack?
          Dropping the windows jinitiator dll into /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins isn't gonna do it, and the applications launcher page is using a the object tag instead of the applet one.
      • Oddly enough, my mac (OS X) runs all of those forms/swing apps I've tried without a complaint even though it's obviously not running JInitiator and isn't certified to work. Same goes for their JDeveloper IDE. Given the apparent lack of JVM incompatability, I'd imagine they'll just do away with JInitiator.

    • Re:Don't they get it? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:50AM (#8007339)
      Oracle Applications use a custom Java framework they call J-Initiator. This is Windows only at the time.

      I find it funny that Oracle is now supporting Linux instead of just saying they support it, in fact now Red Hat Advanced server on Dell hardware is their platform of choice. Less than a year ago they were not even maintaining most of their Linux products.

    • Re:Don't they get it? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PierceLabs ( 549351 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @12:05PM (#8007428)
      Actually I think they get it more than you do I'm afraid. We're entering a period where the industry is about to jump start is previously dot-bomb aborted attempt to create platforms for rich client applications that work in internet browsers. For all the good that HTML is, developers and corporations alike want to do more.... a WHOLE lot more. Even Macromedia is realizing that it was in the ballpark with their Generator product and is coming out with Flex.

      This migration to rich internet UIs would have happened a long time ago, but when the bubble burst - all of the companies doing anything innovative in that space died and took all their ideas with them and scattered the talent to the four winds. As the tech industry recovers, expect them to start where they left off - just with a business plan that wasn't written by underpants gnomes.

      • create platforms for rich client applications that work in internet browsers.

        So I know just enough to ask a question: How do these rich client application development tools compare with one another?

        1. XUL
        2. ActiveX
        3. PEAR
        4. SVG/{Java,ECMA}Script
        5. Java/Swing

    • Re:Don't they get it? (Score:5, Informative)

      by bungo ( 50628 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @12:09PM (#8007451)
      In fact, it does currently work, and there are alot of people currently using it under Linux.

      The problem is that for windows, they have created a n installation package which automatically installs a java applet and signs it with a downloaded certificate. They don't have package so far for Linux, so the only people using Linux are the more technical users who can manually install the correct Sun jdk bits and certificate manually.

      Pointy haried bosses, even if they allow Linux, don't like custom, unsupported installs.

    • Re:Don't they get it? (Score:5, Informative)

      by BrerBear ( 8338 ) * on Saturday January 17, 2004 @12:44PM (#8007611)
      I work on Oracle's HTML technologies (don't want to say more).

      Much of the problem involves bugs and different behaviors in Javascript and CSS implementations across browsers. Sometimes the standards are interpreted differently, or areas of a standard aren't supported. None of the problems are insurmountable, but the sad reality is that anyone doing advanced DHTML and CSS is forced to use different code paths in at least a few places. Web application authors will know what I mean.

      The applications have generally worked well already because the developers inside Oracle often prefer to use Mozilla as their day-to-day browser.

      The important point of the announcement (at least as far as the HTML apps are concerned) is support; committing to testing those various browsers across such a large set of projects is no trivial cost, even for a large company.

      And it's not like Mozilla doesn't come out with a new version every three months or so, with it's own new regressions.

      This is just another step in helping to give Mozilla corporate acceptance, and that will be good for everyone.

  • Obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ultrabot ( 200914 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:35AM (#8006943)
    Shouldn't supporting Mozilla be obvious? Web applications should adhere to standards, if they don't, well, they are crappy web applications in the first place. I don't consider this "generous", rather than just fixing their broken applications to work like they should have worked in the first place.

    • Re:Obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:43AM (#8006985)
      "Supporting Mozilla" does not necesarily have anything to do with Web applications. Mozilla is more than just a web browser. It's a cross-platform GUI toolkit, and applications can be written using it. I seem to recall that Nokia was once considering using Mozilla as the UI for their Linux-based operating system on a set-top box or kiosk type device.

      I'd be surprised if any web applications that Oracle have don't already work in Mozilla. Running in normal web browsers is, after all, the whole point of having web applications, otherwise people could write Java Applications (not applets) or normal non-portable executables instead.
    • wooohahahahah! When did you last try netbanking? At work, our mega-$$$$$$ web-apps for purchase and expense-reporting, made by the oh so european and independent SAP, go completly bonkers if you switch from MS-java to SUN-in-IE. Let alone you would get mozilla to run it.
      • That's funny all my online banking sites support Mozilla just fine. Fleet Boston, National City Bank and Key Corp's websites all work just fine. True I had to talk to one of my friends at National City to get Mozilla added to their testing procedure but it now works fine.
    • If you believe that the browsers themselves adhere to the standards, then you are very naive.

      Not to mention that Mozilla (and other browsers) regularly introduce bugs and regressions in subsequent versions. IE's Javascript alone has changed a lot over the last few versions.

      "Support" doesn't mean writing to a theoretical markup language, crossing your fingers, and handing your product over to customers. It means guarantees and testing, which have real costs if you've worked on anything besides a small scal
      • If you believe that the browsers themselves adhere to the standards, then you are very naive.

        Perhaps not all the standards. But if you write the app w/ standards in mind, and also see that it runs on *some* browser, it is fair to expect the other browser to catch up.
        • But if you write the app w/ standards in mind, and also see that it runs on *some* browser, it is fair to expect the other browser to catch up.

          Fair maybe, but a terrible business decision. IE hasn't done much catching up for the last few years. I wouldn't say it's a very good business decision to not support IE until it "catches up" with Mozilla's standards support.

          Or maybe you should rethink your earlier statement about only "crappy" and "broken" applications needing to be explicitly certified on a par
          • Or maybe you should rethink your earlier statement about only "crappy" and "broken" applications needing to be explicitly certified on a particular browser. To criticize people and organizations who are going out of their way to invest in supporting platforms with miniscule market share doesn't really help your cause of standards promotion.

            When the application is core enough to ones' customers that they'd gladly install the appropriate platform to be able to use it -- and when the platform is licensed in

  • Step in the right direction. (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    THat's nice to here.

    Oracle is not only making sure that you can run MS-free software in the database and servers room, you can also run MS-free software in the DESKTOP!

    It is propriatory software, given, but it's not a perfect world and definately a step in the right directions.

    Linux is accepted componate of most server rooms out their nowadays. It's nice to see companies like oracle and novell to begin to extend their support out into the desktop and end-user world.

  • Beware of the Oracle (Score:5, Interesting)

    by thirty2bit ( 685528 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:39AM (#8006964)
    I trust Oracle about as much as I trust Microsoft. Let's hope they don't set their sights on acquisition, because their algorithm goes "embrace-acquire-mediocrify-priceincrease"
    • I trust Oracle about as much as I trust Microsoft.

      I trust them even less. Larry Ellison is so desperate to take over Bill Gates' position as Richest Software Mogul he's willing to go to great lengths to out-sleaze him. Plus he was pretty quick to jump on the National ID Card bandwagon a few years back.

      • Re:Beware of the Oracle (Score:2, Interesting)

        by lukew ( 528994 )
        I trust them even less. Larry Ellison is so desperate to take over Bill Gates' position as Richest Software Mogul he's willing to go to great lengths to out-sleaze him. Plus he was pretty quick to jump on the National ID Card bandwagon a few years back.

        What company pushing enterprise database systems wouldn't? That's a moot comment.
        Why trust them less? They're huge and get press. That doesn't mean that the sleaze bags who run that company are any worse then the sleaze bags who run a company that get no

        • Why trust them less? They're huge and get press. That doesn't mean that the sleaze bags who run that company are any worse then the sleaze bags who run a company that get no press.

          Actually I disagree with that.
          A company that has 'made it big' is far more likely to be completely untrustworthy than one which is quietly pottering away in their corner of the globe. At the big end of town, you either play dirty, or get replaced by someone else who does.

          I would put my support behind Oracle simply to weeken Mic

    • I don;t know about you but I really wouldn't care if they increased the price of Mozilla by as much as 400%!

  • FIrebird (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PatrickThomson ( 712694 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:39AM (#8006965)
    Will this have any impact on Firebird, which is the sweetest browser I ever did use?

  • The enemy of my enemy... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Trigun ( 685027 ) <<xc.hta.eripmelive> <ta> <live>> on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:40AM (#8006968)
    From the Article:

    It is widely believed that another primary motivation behind Oracle's embrace of Linux is to push archrival Microsoft Corp. out of its position of power. In pursuit of that goal, Oracle will enable its customers to opt for Mozilla over Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, just as they have enabled customers to opt out of Microsoft operating systems in favor of Linux.

    So they're backing free software, something laughed at by most corporate bodies up until this time, to beat Bill. Capitalists using communists to fight fascists. Neat!
    • So they're backing free software, something laughed at by most corporate bodies up until this time, to beat Bill. Capitalists using communists to fight fascists. Neat!

      Free software is communist? Who do you think you are, Laura DiDio?
      • Hey, I may be a communist, but I'm not easily fooled.

      • Free software is communist?

        In the good way, yes. Not in the Soviet (bad) way.

        In communism, everyone shares the money -- with free software, everybody shares software. People are expected to contribute back to the community if they take something out of it in both cases. Communism is a good thing in specific circumstances -- but not as a socioeconomic system of a country. Capitalism has its place too. It is great for building a large, productive economy.

        I think it is great that businesses, capitalist

        • > Free software is communist?
          In the good way, yes. Not in the Soviet (bad) way.

          You may also point out that in that context you are describing the scientific method which is also communist. However, you may also note that not everything is accepted back (into the community). Only the most innovative/noteworthy solutions actually make it into code. In that respect, I agree 100% with "communism".
    • I just hope when they say "we will enable Mozilla to run Oracle applications" they don't mean they are going to bloat it up with some non-standards compliant or stupid Java integration.

      Be careful: they may throw money at it to Hijack it. I guess they can always fork.

    • So much for... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by JordanH ( 75307 )
      all the gloom and doom about what would happen to the "orphaned" Mozilla browser now that AOL was dropping it.

  • Oracle (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:42AM (#8006977)
    Oracle is the MS of the database world. Clueless managers insist on using it because they're the biggest DB company, and us geeks are the ones who have to live with the consequences.

    Case in point, my company's got to use Oracle 9i/9iAS for a project, and we must have spent weeks just getting the thing to install properly. We upgraded our developers machines to XP last week, and it won't even install on clean machines.

    Don't get me started on their idea of supporting open standards. JAZN (their implementation of JAAS) anyone?

    • Oracle is pretty good in its target niche (Score:4, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @12:45PM (#8007615) Homepage Journal
      Oracle is the MS of the database world. Clueless managers insist on using it because they're the biggest DB company, and us geeks are the ones who have to live with the consequences.

      Although I don't like the company and it's hideous culture, I actually rather like the Oracle RDBMS It's powerful, feature-ful, and possible to tune to a fare-thee-well. It is very easy to screw up if you don't know what you're doing, so start easily. Installing on Windows is a snap; Unix installers have always been crap; I guess they figure Unix folks don't need as much handholding. I don't know why you had problems with XP, I've never had a problem.

      You really can't compare MS and Oracle from an engineering standpoint. MS is about making getting into the product easy and regretting it later. Oracle is rougher on the novice but solves a lot of tough problems (at a price) that come up in large, bet the company kind of projects. Oracle is not a "hey kids lets put on a show" kind of product, which is not to denigrate systems like MySQL which are better suited for projects in that kind of niche and remarkably flexible given that kind of easy startup. If you need a database to handle the hit counter in your personal web page, Oracle's not for you. In Oracle's niche a few weeks of startup time hardly matter at all, given downstream failover capabilities, scalability, availability, and tunability. Generally speaking Oracle's forte is the kinds of projects where you hire a lead DBA with a decade or more of serious DBA experience, and happily pay the kind of salary that commands. Unfortunately, Oracle doesn't give a shit about newbies, which may not be wise in the long run given MS's focus on making things feel nice and cozy for them. Everyone starts out as a newbie, and MS knows the long term value of newbie mindshare.

      One way that Oracle is like MS is that they want to completely own the database market the way MS wants to completely own the OS market. This is hardly surprising, since they want to make lots money. However, monoculture in database management systems would be even worse than in operating system. There is a huge universe of database applications out there, and a variety of products fit well into various spaces. There are even places for products a database professional would consider toys: FileMaker and yes, MS Access.

      Grossly simplifying the picture, you can picture a scale with personal databases in the MS Access space on the left, massive enterprise-wide and megadatabses on the right, and workgroup, special purpose databases with varying degrees of transaction and record volume falling various points in the middle. Filemaker and Access are single points on the far left. MySQL, Postgres, FireBird, and similar databases extend from the far left to left of center. Oracle is useful from the middle of the scale to the far right.

      It's a gross simplification, of course, because there isn't a single dimension along which you can measure a database project's scale, but several: record volume, update volme, query volume, query complexity, availability requirements, schema complexity etc. But dial up each of these dimensions to the max, and Oracle's probably a no-brainer. Keep the dials all near the minimum, and Oracle's a waste. Twist them into various patterns, and you really have to know your database products to decide whether Oracle is the best choice.
    • While you may not be wild about the company, there are a number of items in their favor:
      1. They are not a monopoly in any thing. There are plenty of alternatives.
      2. They actually do have a very good database. It almost certainly has the best performance for general purpose.
      3. Their high prices enable others to come in and compete (MS always lowers their in markets to the point of free that they do not monopolize).
    • I agree. I think there DB is great, though I am not fond of their J2EE server. It is EXTREMLY bloated. The managers at the fortune 500 I am a developer at are forcing us to use 9iAS (though at least they let me install it on Linux servers). It is a resource hog. Our applications scream under Tomcat 5.x, it handled all of our needs, is free and Open Source and has far better resource utilization. Sadly, in the end we lost out to politics and are running Oracle 9iAS as our production J2EE servers, though

  • Sadly... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:50AM (#8007010)
    I work there and would bet it will be a long time before this works as planned. Way too many internal sights require IE to work at all. We are still at a point where you can NOT have a purely Linux desktop and still get your daily work completed.

    I would not say Oracle Apps works on standards like the poster above was explaining either - it requires a Java plugin (very similar to - and based on Sun's Java Plugin) called JInitiator. JInitiator has to be loaded and used by the browser so it it not like any browser can be a client... unless Jinit is ported to the platform and plugin architecture.

    It will be a happy day when we can actually USE Linux on the desktop at work though.
    • "It will be a happy day when we can actually USE Linux on the desktop at work though."

      You CAN use Oracle Apps with Linux. See my other post at this location [slashdot.org].

      I could be wrong about this, but Jinitiator looks like nothing more than a launching platform for the appropriate JRE. As we all know, there are many versions of Java out there, not to mention the less-than-perfect world of browser integration. Then we have the potential problem of M$ Java hijacking whatever other Java might be installed. Jinitia
    • I'm working there too (and not posting AC) and I use Linux on a day-to-day basis. What problems do you have?? MS Office, IE-only websites? Check the other AC replies which links to CrossoverOffice. Development tools? If so, which?
  • Oracle wants to emphasize that its strategy against M$ is tactical and no just an Ellison ego trip Jan. 12, 2004 Oracle Corporation's Board of Directors announced that it is separating the responsibilities of Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer.The board elected Jeff Henley Chairman of the Oracle Board. In addition, Safra Catz and Charles Phillips have each been promoted to President reporting to Oracle Chief Executive Officer, Larry Ellison
  • Time for you karma whores: could you tell me (and the unwashed masses lingering around here) what 'oracle applications' we'd want to run from our Moz? What do I miss if I have never ever thought on doing so?

    • Re:please educate me (Score:5, Informative)

      by LDoggg_ ( 659725 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:59AM (#8007058) Homepage
      Oralce's apps are an entire suite of Business applications.

      Order Entry, Accounts Receivable/Payable, Inventory, HR.
      While not perfect, for the most part its good stuff.

      These apps are currently launched as applets through a custom JVM plugin called Jinitiator launched through IE.

  • Excellent news! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LDoggg_ ( 659725 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @10:56AM (#8007049) Homepage
    The fact that Jinitiator (Oracle's JVM) has only worked for windows has been the last reason my company hasn't been able to switch to linux.
    All of our Novell stuff now has Linux ports, and OpenOffice suits most of us just fine. Hopefully this is the last piece of the puzzle.
    It would also be really cool if the apps could run through LTSP.

    The article doesn't specifically name a Linux Jinitiator, but I would be more than happy if they got the apps to run using a more recent Sun JVM for Mozilla.
    • Ltsp kicks butt =)

      Im drunk when i type this but still, its teh grits!

      We use it at our school and as an admin i just have to tend to the old windows lab, the ltsp lab just dont require any work besides upgrading which is a matter of "yum update".

      Our windows lab on the other hand, well thats just broken.

      Now im off to bowling and some more beer, have fun yall, SCO is going down!

  • Oracle has a way to go (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sabalon ( 1684 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:01AM (#8007065)
    I guess I don't like the fact that they just work on one distribution and getting it to work elsewhere is a bit of a pain sometimes.

    Though last time I ran the newest oracle application server on linux (based on Apache), it seemed they went out of their way to make it a daunting task. There are about 30 other things that start up with the app server and apache.

    I guess I think of it as simple - client attaches to apache, apache module connects to oracle, but they are going gung-ho on having all the java stuff, and god knows what else built in. Way to much complexity and it caused nothing but trouble...actually had to back down a release.

    It's saturday morning and I'm just ranting, but it seems to me that outside of the database server, which they do well, they do a terrible job of everything else.

    Oracle Enterprise Manager is a good example. Used to ba an app that would connect to the database, let you manage it, etc... Now it's this huge Java thing, requires it's own database just to manage other databases, etc... and doesn't seem to work half the time.

    I guess I've just had terrible luck with anything java based on Linux (or windows for that matter) - well, anything that goes beyond a simple app.
    • The Oracle apps really stink, a few data points:

      1. at one system integrator that I worked at we used their apps to manage our finances and also resold their database. Anyhow their financial app (which we all had to use to record our time) became our #1 example of how *not* to design a UI.

      2. they used java to make it platform independent, but then require IE - which requires windows. Is this brain-dead or what? They might as well have developed the apps in ASP!

      3. in almost any business activity wher

  • I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Get Behind the Mule ( 61986 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:04AM (#8007082)
    A database is a database, which should have nothing to do with user interaction. A web browser is at the presentation level, which is all about user interaction and should have nothing to do with the database.

    If Oracle has been writing software that entangles database code with the presentation level, then they are mixing layers and producing appallingly unmaintainable code, and should stop doing that no later than immediately. On the other hand, if they are writing code that produces HTTP/HTML content in the presentation layer, then it doesn't matter which web browser is used to view it.

    So why would anyone write software that is specifically "for Mozilla", especially a database vendor? They should just adhere to the HTTP/HTML standards in the presentation layer, so that anyone using a standards-compliant browser can view their content.

    Of course, we are talking about Oracle, who has produced PL/SQL packages for generating HTML right out of the database, insist on using their own, outdated JRE's, and perhaps have generated M$-dependent web content. So maybe Oracle is just trying to tell us that they will start doing a couple of things a little bit less stupidly.

    • Very little to do with the database, apps 11i... (Score:5, Informative)

      by chris_martin ( 115358 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:27AM (#8007208)
      Oracle has a complete end-to-end ERP/CRM application called Applicaitons 11i which uses a combination of java applets (delivered through Forms Server 6i) JSP's (delivered through apache) etc. The problem is that some of their HTML code makes windows IE only calls (even though they officially support the Mac running IE) using the object tag instead of applet tags, etc. Also, they have a ton of other web apps (Discoverer, their iAS application server and portal server, etc.) all with IE only stuff in them.
    • Or maybe they are building a bridge, so you don't need a web server to connect to, but an internal driver that connects to oracle databases via soap or something. How about letting them produce something before we jump on the unknown, eh?

    • ... for those who don't actually read it.

      "Most of our support has been in the area of servers," Dargo said. "We'll be looking to add enabling Linux as a client for Oracle applications via the Mozilla browser, so Oracle customers can use Mozilla to access Oracle applications. We're looking at not just supporting Linux as a server but looking at supporting Linux as a client."

      There is more involved in having a DBMS than just the database, you know. You gotta have the client tools to actually work with it.

  • Mozilla isn't Linux-exclusive (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Xpilot ( 117961 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:06AM (#8007096) Homepage
    It works on many other operating systems too, including the proprietary Windows. But it is still a success for Linux and open source in general, because any technology that does not allow Microsoft to lock in its customers is a win for freedom, and a loss for Microsoft. Microsoft values one thing more than money, that is the guarantee of making more money (marketshare strangehold). So as Linux and other open source operating systems gains widespread acceptance not just in the server space but with clients too, Microsoft loses out. Microsoft isn't left out or locked out, it is just forced to play on an level playing field.

    So victory for open source is not the complete desctruction of the towers of Barad-dur in Redmond, but the creation of a fair and competitive server and desktop market and the neutralization of Microsoft's monopoly power. Once we have that, we have already won. Marketshare numbers will be meaningless, since you are not forced to adopt the platform with the highest market share to get the software solutions that you need.

  • *VERY* smart move. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:13AM (#8007135)
    This is an extremely smart move on Oracles behalf, imho.
    One would think that moving to service orientation would be the way to go, with OSS critical mass just around the corner.
    But this proves that Oracle is thinking further, where OSes are only a commodity and clients networking capabilites count.
    By extending Mozilla with their stuff they're adding a feature to Oracle that others don't have (yet), despite the fact that Oracle DB probably has had these features for years. Clients for free, server service capable software for good ol' cash. This move will do two things for Oracle: It will establish their image as early adapters and full supporters of OSS *and* it will let them maintain their standard business model a little longer: selling bizarely priced DBs and other software stuff.
    Very smart indeed.

  • I knew that Mozilla overbloated, but... (Score:5, Funny)

    by tereshchenko ( 715289 ) <alex@fxfp.com> on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:17AM (#8007151) Homepage
    I knew that Mozilla overbloated (kitchen sink anyone?), but including Oracle DB is a bit overkill I think...
  • > Oracle embraces Mozilla
    Mozilla was a natural choice for Oracle, as both of them are ruthless, flesh-eating predators, who just trample over the weak and possess a tiny brain.

  • That's not as exciting as I thought. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by edbarrett ( 150317 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:37AM (#8007268)
    I was hoping to read the story and say "Well, cool, they're pulling another OEOne [oeone.com] or something.

    But no. It looks like they're just adhering to web standards for their vertical app. Which I appreciate, don't get me wrong, but they might as well have been saying they were embracing Opera [opera.com].

  • This is huge for corporate developers! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by digerata ( 516939 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @11:58AM (#8007386) Homepage
    I have been campaigning mozilla for some time as a replacement to IE for our company of ~1200 Mac and PC users. The one stumbling block is that Oracle's application support under anything but IE sucks.

    This is the best saturday EVER!!!! Woohooo!

  • Netscape/Mozilla plug-in compatibility (Score:5, Informative)

    by EricWright ( 16803 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @12:06PM (#8007433) Journal
    Due to netscape and mozilla being (for the most part) plug-in compatible, I've been using Oracle Apps via Mozilla (and Phoenix/Firebird) for at least 3-4 years now.

    All you have to do is download oajinit.exe (yes, this is windows) and install it. Then, you need to find the dll that's installed (the name contains the version number of Jinitiator, but I'm not at work so I can't say for sure what it is) and drop the .dll into the Mozilla plugins folder. Restart Mozilla and get to work... this may require a pre-existing netscape installation, not too sure. Everywhere I've worked pre-installed netscape for their users. If you have to go that route, it's not too hard to uninstall netscape once you have Jinitiator and Mozilla/Firebird playing nice with each other.

    Now, I'd love to see more linux support as a client machine. The only reason I have to use windows at work is the lack of a supported solution to running oracle apps client from linux. The developer apps are pretty crappy compared to the windows ports, but they do work.

    Not only do I play an Oracle apps developer on TV, I am one in real life, too!

  • I would rather hear (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Good, though I would rather hear they're modifying Oracle to work properly under Mozilla than that they're modifying Mozilla to work properly with Oracle.

  • use the Oracle Power Browser (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Oracle had their own browser back in the mid 90's when the IE and Netscape battle was heating up. What ever happened to the Oracle Power Browser?
  • they should be embracing web standards, not supporting Mozilla. Hopefully they won't mess up the mozilla support by making it moz-specific. Mozilla is great, no doubt about it, and this is a terrific win for them, but web standards are what we should be more excited about.

  • xforms / jabber / roaming profles (Score:3, Informative)

    by hpavc ( 129350 ) on Saturday January 17, 2004 @06:35PM (#8009930)
    they can start by making a cros platform xforms extension for mozilla, roaming profiles, intergrate their implimentation of jabber into mozilla as a extension.

    instantly mozilla would be ready for business in a serious way versus ie.

    oracle would have a full featured desktop client.
  • I heard that they're thinking of extending OpenOffice in similiar ways too. I'm sure there are people who cant wait for that, but i'm not sure yet if this is a good thing or bad ...

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