What is the future of Oracle Discoverer? Freeware??

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What is the future of Oracle Discoverer? Freeware??

Written by Nilesh Jethwa

Agree or not, with all the recent acquisitions, Oracle has ended with multiple apples in the same basket. Just take the ad-hoc category for instance. This category was filled by Oracle Discoverer and then came Siebel Answers and I am not sure how Brio compares with the former two but if it does then it could be the third apple in the basket. Believe it or not multiple products in the same category is often deemed confusing rather than complimenting each other.

So what are the options? Oracle is putting all its force behind Siebel and we could see atleast one release of Discoverer. I think the best thing for Oracle would be to make Discoverer as a freeware tool.

Seeing MySQL as a threat, Oracle made its own version of database as a freeware. They already had Jdeveloper (a complete development environment) as freeware. So the only component that is missing as freeware is the BI and reporting piece.

Having a free Database + free Development tool + free reporting = more power to Oracle!

The more I think of this it becomes more compelling to release Oracle Discoverer as a freeware. If in future, Oracle doesn’t like to maintain or keep developing Discoverer then there is an alternative to make it Open Source. This could counter some of the threat from the open source BI companies like Pentaho and JasperSoft.

What do you think? Does it make sense to release Discoverer as a freeware tool?