Larry Ellison
Co-founder and CEO, Oracle
Selling the relational database to the enterprise
Rating
90Impact score
Domains
DatabasesEnterprise softwareAcquisitions
Scouting report
Read Codd’s paper on the relational model and shipped a commercial product from it before IBM did, then spent thirty-seven years as CEO making Oracle the enterprise system of record, largely by acquisition: PeopleSoft, Siebel, and in 2010 Sun. That made Oracle the steward of Java and MySQL, and the plaintiff in Google v. Oracle. The Supreme Court ruled fair use in 2021.
Curator’s note
Owns more of the software you depend on than the licence file admits.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Larry Ellison by Oracle PR Hartmann Studios, licensed CC BY 2.0.
Sources
- 01Larry Ellison en.wikipedia.org
- 02Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. en.wikipedia.org