Bill Gates and Larry Ellison are probably the last of their breed, pretty sad so early in the software sector's life.
Bill Gates gives away a browser, a media player, backup software, anti virus software, and other products to sell an OS and office suite. I think its pretty much what oracle is doing now... Put something extra out there it may hurt other companies who sell that product (in oracles case MySql and in MS's Netscape, Real Audio)..
Not yet but it is being severely deteriorated. Ellison is frantically buying all these application vendors because he knows free software clones from overseas like MySQL will soon overtake his flagship database product.
Bill Gates gives away a browser, a media player, backup software, anti virus software...
That only run on his for-sale product. If Oracle was only giving away utilities that required the purchase of their database your analogy might apply, but obviously and not surprisingly it doesn't. Microsoft doesn't give any mini opearating systems away, but if and when they do it will be a sad day for those that develop and sell software, as the value of software will have further declined.
The thought of a lightweight database on my developers desktop freeing them to write software without stepping on each others toes is also of value to me but not enough to but a copy of oracle for every one of them & more likely to use oracle based application (the ones we pay big money for) because of it. This will hurt MySql and MSSql (we use MSSql in some places because its cheaper for the developers to use it as I have described)