Oracle's Infrastructure Now Fully Linux-izedOracle's Infrastructure Now Fully Linux-ized

Oracle is aggressively adopting Linux both internally and for its products, despite SCO Group's threats earlier this week that it may sue those who don't pay licensing fees to the company. Chuck Rozwat, an Oracle executive VP, says the company has moved its IT infrastructure to Linux, a year after CEO Larry Ellis issued the mandate.

"We run our business on Linux," Rozwat said at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. "If you look at any IT company, Oracle is by far the leader at running Linux."

Oracle chose the platform because of its strengths in security, scalability, and performance, he said. In the coming year, Oracle will move its base development platform to Linux, including putting the open-source operating system on the workstations of 8,000 developers. "It'll be a great improvement for us," Rozwat said. Next month, Oracle intends to release Oracle 10G for Linux for grid computing. About 700 of the company's customers are running its E-business Suite on Linux, Rozwat said. About a year ago, Oracle started shipping RAC (real application cluster) for Linux to the likes of British Telecom, Burlington Coat Factory, Dell, and Merrill Lynch.

Oracle maintains its bullish stance on Linux, despite the copyright, intellectual-property, and unfair competition lawsuits introduced by various players in the market. "Oracle believes that anything that leads to a more rapid resolution of the issues raised by SCO is good for the industry and for the open-source community," Dave Dargo, VP of Oracle's Linux Program Office, said in an E-mail interview.

"Oracle has seen nothing to date that has caused us to question our tremendous commitment to Linux as a customer, promoter, supporter, and developer," Dargo said. "We are continuing our deep commitment to Linux and look forward to seeing these issues resolved as quickly as possible. We will continue to work with our close partners such as Red Hat and other Linux distributors to promote continued adoption of Linux."