Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Oracle buys Innobase

Tom Lane wrote:

>
>
>They might hope that they could drive the existing support companies out
>of business (assuming they didn't get convicted of antitrust violations
>first --- which would be an open-and-shut case, but with the Republicans
>in office they probably wouldn't get prosecuted :-().
>
Sort of off-topic but after actually reading up on notable antitrust
cases (such as AT&T), I think that the current situation wrt Microsoft
is exactly how antitrust law works best in our legal system.  And anyone
who thinks that Microsoft effectively put this behind them has not been
following Novell v. Microsoft and a myriad of other cases.  Because
Microsoft has lost their case, certain facts cannot be litigated,
meaning that it is now open season on suing Microsoft for antitrust
violations.... (IANAL, but you can ask one about "collateral estoppel"
which is a really nasty ball of wax for Microsoft at the moment).  The
current settlement really was forced on the DoJ by the appeals court.
This is one area where Microsoft would have been better off (and we
might be worse off) had they been broken up.  For example, AMD faces a
much harder antitrust case against Intel than Novel does against
Microsoft for the reason that Intel has settled all previous antitrust
cases without admitting guilt.  Don't think so?  Why do you think
Microsoft settled IBM's antitrust claims before the lawsuit was even
filed (normally people at least go through pretrial motions to see how
much of the complaint they can get dropped before settling)?  Indeed I
have personally wondered if Microsoft opened themselves up to more
lawsuits by recommending that Baystar invest in SCO....

As for Oracle, they don't exactly have a steller reputation.  However,
they hopefully have enough to sense to avoid antitrust cases they could
lose.  At least in the past, their prior questionable actions have been
of generally unfair business practices such as industrial espionage
(didn't they hire the firm that got the janatorial contract at Microsoft
to do dumpster-diving for them in 1999 or so).

But the biggest issue for them is that other parties (such as IBM and
Microsoft) have been making substantial inroads into Oracle's core
market.  Spend too much in the way of resources attacking us and they
divert resources from the clear dangers that they have from large
commercial competitors.

>  Then they raise
>their rates to make lotsa money, or maybe they'd think they could drop
>support at that point and the project would die for lack of commercial
>support.  (They seem to understand open-source poorly enough that they
>might think that would happen.)
>
>
Who knows?  Maybe they will resort to dumpster-diving to try to discover
our super-secret-source-code... ;-)

>I don't see any of this happening though.  As suggested upthread,
>the very *last* thing Oracle wants is to raise the visibility and
>credibility of Postgres by a couple of orders of magnitude --- which
>is exactly what they'd be doing by offering support for it, even if
>the support was only temporary.  The effects of getting the word out
>would persist long afterwards.
>
>
I would suggest that Oracle has not formed a strategy for outcompeting
us yet, and it may be several years before they take the threat we pose
seriously enough to really start work on it.  I would suspect that we
are treated as "one of a crowd of mid-size RDBMS competitors," and have
not been singled out yet for special treatment (MySQL was singled out in
2000 at the latest).  Oracle's current strategy seems to be in trying to
push things like parallel queries, grid computing, etc. as a way of
providing scalability and room for growth, providing advantages for
certain scenarios.  They could then use the high-end to subsidize the
low end, like Sun does with Solaris (though I think that this is a
losing strategy and Microsoft's inverse strategy of subsidizing the
high-end with the commodity market is ultimately more effective).

Maybe when Bizgres MPP comes out things will change ;-)

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers