FAQ - Oracle and Open Source

· What is Oracle's commitment to Open Source?
· What are Oracle's contributions to Open Source?
· What is Oracle's commitment to Linux?
· What is Oracle's direction with Berkeley DB?
· How does Oracle support PHP?
· What is meant by Oracle's "commitment to Open Source"?
· How can I get more information on Oracle's Open Source efforts?

What is Oracle's commitment to Open Source?

Oracle is committed to developing, supporting, and promoting Open Source. Oracle has been, and continues to be, committed to offering choice, flexibility, and a lower cost of computing for end users. By investing significant resources in developing, testing, optimizing and supporting open source technologies such as Linux, PHP, Apache, Eclipse, Berkeley DB, and InnoDB, Oracle is clearly embracing and offering open source solutions as a viable choice for development and deployment. Today, many customers are using Oracle and supported open source technologies in mission-critical environments and are reaping the benefits of lower costs, easier manageability, higher availability, and reliability along with performance and scalability advantages.

With technical contributions to enhance Linux, code-level support of the key Linux systems, and strategic partnerships, Oracle is offering an Unbreakable Linux platform for customers to safely deploy Linux in a mission-critical environment.

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What are Oracle's contributions to Open Source?

Oracle has been a member of Eclipse since the project's inception, and has made many contributions to the Eclipse community. Oracle's BPEL Designer—a design-time tool to orchestrate web services into business processes—is offered as an Eclipse plug-in, in addition to being a part of Oracle JDeveloper. Oracle has also committed to contributing Object/Relational mapping functionality to the Eclipse Foundation to help promote Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0.

In addition, Oracle develops and offers open source products such as Berkeley DB, which is embedded in many popular applications both open and closed source.

By making our contributions open source, we ensure that the software is adopted and enhanced by the community. For a complete list of Oracle's open source projects, visit http://oss.oracle.com/.

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What is Oracle's commitment to Linux?

Oracle's long-standing commitment to Linux started when it released the industry's first commercial database on Linux in 1998, and that leadership continues today. Only Oracle makes Linux Unbreakable by providing support for the Linux operating system, making technical contributions to the Linux kernel, and forging strategic partnerships, enabling customers to deploy their mission-critical transactional and decision support applications on low-cost Linux servers.

Oracle further demonstrates its commitment to Linux by running its own IT systems on Linux, and has realized first-hand the benefit of lower IT costs from using Linux in a grid computing infrastructure. For more information, read the Oracle on Linux FAQ.

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What is Oracle's direction with Berkeley DB?

Oracle continues to develop and offer Berkeley DB as an open source product. Oracle Berkeley DB is the most widely used open source database in the world with deployments estimated at more than 200 million. With Berkeley DB, Oracle offers a family of open source developer databases that allows developers to embed in their applications a fast, scalable, transactional database engine with industrial grade reliability and availability. Berkeley DB is distributed under a dual license model, i.e. available under a public license and also available under a commercial license. Well-known open source projects such as Linux, BSD UNIX, Apache Web Server, OpenLDAP directory, OpenOffice productivity software, as well as many other open source and commercial products embed Berkeley DB.

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How does Oracle support PHP?

Oracle is fully committed to offering PHP developers with seamless access to fully reliable, highly available, secure and scalable infrastructure, both for development and deployment. Many key Oracle products are PHP-enabled. Oracle offers a PHP extension with Oracle JDeveloper, and PHP support with Oracle Application Server. The JDeveloper PHP extension allows for interoperability between PHP and other popular technologies such as Java. Oracle publishes best practices and resources for PHP developers via the Oracle Technology Network PHP Developer Center.

Together with Zend Technologies, Oracle also offers Zend Core for Oracle, a fully tested and supported PHP 5 distribution that includes integration with Oracle Database client libraries, which enables developers to get up and running in minutes with PHP and Oracle. Zend Core for Oracle, a pre-built stack for PHP developers, makes it easier for them to develop and deploy applications on a robust infrastructure.

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Oracle is not only committed to enhancing many open source technologies by contributing code but is also very committed to enabling users to deploy open source in their environments. Oracle invests significant resources in testing and optimizing open source technologies in our test lab, so that they can integrate well with other open and closed source solutions. In addition, Oracle offers best practices and recommendations on deploying open source solutions. For example, Oracle Validated Configurations offer best practices for Linux deployments.

How can I get more information on Oracle's Open Source efforts?

Please visit http://oss.oracle.com for more information on Oracle and Open Source.

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