Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Drop Oracle support

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4: Re: Drop Oracle support (response to 1)
Posted by Caroline Meeks on
Ok I’m going to wax philosophical here…

In broad terms I see OpenACS as expanding from where we have been since the ArsDigita days…

1. a great platform that will cut 6 months off of your development time for a custom web application.

To also be:

2. A great the foundation for a set of complex, feature rich, "out of the box" applications that are immediately and directly useful for specific market verticals.

We are an open source project. As we move in a new direction we do it in a very distributed and diverse open source way. It doesn’t look and feel like a company that makes a plan and a roadmap and then executes against it. It looks like a thousand flowers blooming. Maybe some of them not so pretty, not so good smelling, and probably some of them die. I see dotFOLIO, dotKNOW, Project Open, dotLRN and even all the thread of people installing openacs and trying to install every package out there as all examples of flowers in this new field.

If we look at oracle support from this perspective. Oracle support in the platform world is a sellable, valuable thing with a good market nitch. If an organization needs to use oracle, for historical reasons, for political reasons, or because they need very close integration with an legacy and/or proprietary oracle app, then OpenACS is a great tool. This has been true for years and will remain true for some years to come.

What is new is the OpenACS is is in fact supporting a number of “out of the boxish” products. Our struggle is that we really not being able to take Oracle support with us into this new arena. If you look at this from an economic perspective this makes sense. If you have a free alternative and an expensive alternative for the same out of the box product why would you pay for oracle?

As we embrace and struggle with more out of the box usefulness lets not forget that we remain a great platform for custom web app development.

I think we need to separate Oracle and Postgres support. We can’t let oracle be a stone tied to the ankles of our products, especially during this critical thousand flower period as we find out what is and isn’t going to make it long term. However, what we have in Oracle is still valuable for some organizations. We just need to advertise it truthfully, yet with a positive spin.

The glass is truly half full, probably even three quarters full, if you want to develop a custom app using Oracle. If you expect to run the latest out of the box functionality on oracle without hiring a vendor or making a programming investment…well maybe the glass is not so full.