Open Source Blog

You could be forgiven for thinking Oracle has enough on its plate at the moment given its recent acquisitions of PeopleSoft (and therefore also JD Edwards) as well as Siebel, Profitlogic, Retek, I-Flex, and G-Log, but the likes of JBoss, Zend and Sleepycat would be relatively small scale purchases for the firm.

A move into open source software would also make sense for the company as it tries to expand its middleware business and protect its database business from the likes of Microsoft, MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Let's start with JBoss - the largest of the three acquisition targets, and valued at around $400m according to BusinessWeek. It would certainly give the company more middleware market share.

According to figures from BZ Research's Fourth Annual Java Use and Awareness Study JBoss AS had a 33.9% in 2004, ahead of IBM with 32.9% BEA 27.9%, and finally Oracle with 21.4%.

The easy availability of JBoss software makes it a popular choice for development and the company would help Oracle grab market and mind share at the low-end (fending off IBM's WebSphere Application Server Community Edition - formerly the open source Gluecode application server) as well support subscription revenue at the mid-to-high-end as it moves into more production environments.

JBoss is also a technically advanced company, and would provide Oracle not just with application server market share, but some of the brightest minds in Java middleware outside Sun Microsystems.

The main downside I see with this one is that the company is in the midst of certifying its application products for its Fusion Middleware portfolio, and would have to start the process all over again for JBoss.

Next comes open source PHP programming language vendor Zend, which BusinessWeek reckons could be worth up to $200m. The two companies are already partners, teaming up last year to produce Zend Core for Oracle a tested PHP development and production environment for creating PHP applications that is tightly integrated with the Oracle Database.

Given PHP's popularity as a web-application development language, the acquisition of Zend could give Oracle an advantage in the move to dynamic SOA-enabled web applications.

Sleepycat and its Berkeley DB open source embedded database would be another interesting choice. The company claims over 200 million deployments of Berkeley DB, which is available under both open source and commercial licenses, and already partners with JBoss.

Sleepycat is also said to be working with open source database vendor MySQL to develop a transactional table type using Berkeley DB, enabling MySQL to get around the problem of its storage engine of choice, InnoDB, having been acquired by… Oracle.

It has not been clear why Oracle chose to acquire Innobase and its InnoDB storage engine in October last year. A lot of people saw it merely as a way of knocking MySQL out of its stride. If any of the rumours currently doing the rounds are true, it would suggest that perhaps the InnoDB purchase was the start of something much bigger.