Oracle Application Express Curriculum Announcement - an Addendum

Earlier today, on the "official" Oracle APEX blog, I published the announcement of the release of the Oracle Application Express curriculum with a permissive-use license.

Firstly, many thanks go to Chaitanya Koratamaddi, a product manager on the Oracle APEX team, based out of Hyderabad, India.  Chaitanya worked tirelessly on the development of this curriculum over the past year.  It's been a grand goal of ours to quickly grow the global APEX community, and one of the best ways to do this is by working with educators.  As I said in an earlier blog post, while education in Oracle Application Express (APEX) is offered as a part of many university and secondary school courses around the globe, in most cases, the educators took it upon themselves to develop their own custom curriculum.  We wanted to make it easy for new educators to adopt Oracle Application Express as part of a secondary school or university curriculum, and this freely offered curriculum will go a long way towards that.

Once the curriculum was developed and published, then the real fun began, namely, working within Oracle to have the curriculum released with a permissive use license.  One of the primary reasons for a permissive-use license was to be able to engage the ever-vibrant Oracle APEX community in the crowd-sourcing of translated content, as evidenced by translate-apex.com.  If this curriculum content was provided with a standard Oracle copyright, then translation of the content by a third-party couldn't even be considered.  We were told from the outset that it was very unlikely this request for a permissive-use license would ever be approved by one or more of the approving lines of business within Oracle.  We were asked if this was this ever done before at Oracle, and to our knowledge, it was not.  Setting precedent is never a good position to be in when you're humbly seeking approvals. ;)

However, after numerous months and rewriting the business justification numerous times, all approvals were obtained within Oracle.  And from this, I have two simple observations:

1. Oracle is changing, and for the better.  Five years ago, there is zero chance this would have ever been approved within Oracle.  Zero.
   
2. Oracle Application Express leads this great company...again.

If you're interested in the freely available curriculum for Oracle APEX, please visit apex.oracle.com/education.