I sometimes really wonder what kind of herb Larry Ellison smokes to come up with such nonsense:
"Open source becomes successful when major industrial corporations invest heavily in that open source project," Ellison said at a Tokyo news conference. "Every open source product that has become tremendously successful became successful because of huge dollar investments from commercial IT operations like IBM and Intel and Oracle and others," he said.
Yes, financial support from companies has indeed benefited one or another open source project. But to conclude that without this financing the projects would not be successful is completely crazy. On the contrary: many companies only invest in projects that have already become successful without external help. Smaller projects with less visibility have no chance of getting money from large IT companies - these are sometimes supported by companies, but then usually by companies that have directly started this project or market direct products based on it.
But of course, with the successes that a number of open source database systems have, he naturally has to rattle loudly and talk nonsense so that no one notices how pathetic Oracle really is by today's standards.
