The success of Linux and other open source projects has depended heavily on the support and investment of major IT companies, Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison said, "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.

He highlighted his own company's work in developing and promoting Linux, and said the operating system would not have enjoyed the success that it has without vendor backing.

Ellison made his remarks at a meeting with reporters during Oracle's OpenWorld conference in Japan, where the company unveiled a new enterprise search technology.

Some analysts have credited Linux 's success to support from big vendors, notably IBM's decision in 2000 to invest $1 billion in the operating system. Still, Ellison's remarks are sure to rile the open-source community, which will point to open-source programs that became widely used on the Internet under their own steam, such as the Apache Web server.

Oracle has more developers working on Linux than Red Hat, according to Ellison. Its work has included developing a clustered file system for Linux, he noted. Oracle also holds a majority stake in Tokyo-based Miracle Linux, which created the Asianux linux distribution with companies in South Korea and China.

[Via InfoWorld: Top News]
Prashanth Rai
Tag(s):Open+source, Oracle