All Oracle’s 9000 Programmers To Run Linux By 2005

"Oracle will finish switching its 9,000-person in-house programming staff to Linux by the end of 2004, the database powerhouse said Wednesday." writes Stephen Shankland for CNET News.com. "In October, the company finished the Linux transition for the 5,000 programmers of its Oracle Applications software. Now the transformation has begun for those who work on the database product, said Wim Coekaerts, director of Linux engineering, in an interview at the CeBit trade show here. "By the end of the year, (Linux) is our core platform," Coekaerts said. Oracle is switching because Linux systems are less expensive and faster, he added."

UPDATE: The above news item is actually being discussed on slashdot at the moment. An interesting point that's come up is that Oracle's developer migration is actually from Solaris to Linux, rather than from Windows to Linux as you'd probably have thought. Also, there's an interesting comment about the Oracle 'Virtual Operating System' that could well mean that Solaris will still be the primary platform the Oracle RDBMS is developed for:

"This is perhaps both more and less significant that it first appears.

For those that don't know, from version 8.0 Oracle is in fact two seperate components, VOS (virtual operating system) and Oracle itself. VOS completely abstracts everything from the actual OS; Oracle programmers have their own APIs for file I/O, memory management, networking, threading, scheduling, you name it. To port Oracle to a new platform, VOS is ported, then Oracle itself compiled against the new VOS libraries.

Solaris was the primary platform, which meant that everyone developed on a Solaris box and then compiled against VOS on all platforms prior to release. This meant that inevitably useful new features went into Solaris first, but eventually they would have to be incorporated into VOS otherwise Oracle itself would fail to compile anywhere else.

So, this means that everyone gets a Linux box on their desktop, but they are still developing against VOS, and so while Oracle is pushing Linux as its platform of choice, all its other builds such as Solaris and AIX will remain current."