Oracle's Larry Ellison on Our (His) Future

Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison, on his first visit Israel last weekend, told TheMarker that collaborative open source software is nothing to be feared, and mocked the "Google-envy" he said Microsoft was suffering t an event hosted Saturday night by TheMarker, the American Embassy and Oracle Israel.
"I detect Google-envy in Silicon Valley. In fact, the most interesting thing is that Microsoft has Google-envy, which is fascinating, because Microsoft makes more money than Google," Ellison says.
He was visiting Israel with his family, and spoke during a weekend in which he toured the country by helicopter, from Gaza to Lebanon.
He went on to say that Web 2.0 phenomenon is not a passing fad, and postulated that Google isn't a direct rival. He also believes that one day, Oracle will pass Microsoft and become the world's biggest software company.
But I like most about "Oracle" in Larry Ellison when it comes to talk about what he knows;
"Open source is not something to be feared. Open source is something to be explained. Open source wins not because it's open and not because it's free. Open source wins only when it's better," he says.

The Apache web server is currently the most successful open source product in the world," Ellison says. "It displaced Microsoft IIS not because it was free and not because it was open source, but because it was more secure and faster, and more reliable.

"Linux, I believe, is competing very effectively with (Microsoft's) Windows. The thing that's misleading is that for free software to take over - well, the purchase price of software is only about 10 percent of the total cost of ownership of software. So even if the software is free, the most you can save is 10 percent off. Now the question is, what are your other costs of developing applications, of running applications on a daily basis, of dealing with problems when they occur? We think that Oracle is absolutely very competitive with open source," he says.
Read the complete article at Haaretz

Tags: Oracle, Web 2.0, Apache, Linux, Microsoft, Google, Google-envy