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Friday, December 7, 2007

OSS Power or Ride The Elephant

Today I received the OTN (Oracle Technology Network) monthly newsletter.
Am not going to talk about all the buzz they're doing about their products, new virtualization software etc... In fact besides the widely enterprise used Oracle database (witch make it a must do for me), I HATE ORACLE PRODUCTS! Specially the ugly and buggy OC4J/OAS. Since the last time (almost a year later) I've used it in a real world application, I simply swap it away in favor of the GREAT OSS Application server JBoss! And it really rocks! Now JBoss and Glassfish along with Tomcat for lightweight projects are the main development target for me. And yes they are commercially supported throw RedHat (witch acquired JBoss), and Sun for Glassfish.

Well I've been long to come to the point. Following some link in that newsletter, I've reached some Oracle blog post stating that Oracle product do support Kerberos and Active Directory in response to some other blog post titled "Listen up Oracle and IBM!! You should support direct authentication against Active Directory". Nice Nice illustration of how one can become a single shop bound client (just to not say Slave) that bring them to the point of begging that shop to show them some mercy and ease their pain by implementing some functionality in their multi-millions software. In this story the functionality was already there! but worst the accessible documentation wasn't! requiring you "bound slave" to purchase another multi-millions consulting or training service and you're "locked in the trap!" shivering to amortize your investment, and know what? you'll never do! you are just in the trap!

Lately, I've become (exclusively) an elephant rider! Yeah it's cool to ride such a big, intelligent and friendly animal. Postgres the opensouce community driven, BSD licensed, most powerful object-relational database system and yes it has always been technically far advanced then the other opensouce little brother MySQL (unless in buzz marketing). Now the picture is clear am a happy Postgres user. Postgres for the non believers has spawned a brunch of commercial products like Sybase, MS-SqlServer etc... Support for transactions, triggers, stored procedures, views, sub-selects, user defined objects... And out-of-box GIS compatibility throw PostGis project. Postgres also can run your Oracle application and PL/SQL scripts unchanged!
Well, the relation with the previous's posts is that the BIG SMART FRIENDLY Elephant do support Kerberos, LDAP, Active Directory authentication and for peanut butter lover the communication between the server and client can be carried out throw SSL.

So (the wrap up) the superiority of the OSS model is well proved even where the Big Blue and Oracle fails to deliver such a good well documented and growing community like the one OSS has made. The software market is changing now and those who made the change from the hype to become reality will continue to push it further. Peoples and companies that will adhere and adopt the new world software vision will survive the upcoming century changes. And communities are power! try to own them and you'll fall into your own trap, Freedom is a must!