They call themselves "Power to the People." And they have a message for Larry Ellison.

"Larry, kiss our apps!"

PeopleSoft workers have united in a grassroots campaign to show solidarity with the head honchos in fending off the famously ruthless Oracle chairman's $6.3 billion hostile grab.

The populist revolt swelled Tuesday as a renegade band of 100 employees wrapped PeopleSoft's official color around the trunks of 1,800 trees, turning PeopleSoft's sprawling Pleasanton office park into a sea of blue ribbons.

The anti-Oracle agitating -- officially unsanctioned by PeopleSoft -- kicks into high gear today at the company's annual Fourth of July barbecue, where employees will hawk hundreds of T-shirts with the "kiss our apps" slogan and buttons with a red slash through Oracle.

The Raving Daves, PeopleSoft's house band, will debut a new song sure to be a hit with the Just Say No to Oracle crowd: "Dumpster Dive An' Go to Jail," a rendition of an old Louis Prima tune that pans Ellison and his sidekick, Oracle Vice President Chuck Phillips. The title refers to an incident in which Ellison hired investigators to go through the trash of an organization that supported Oracle arch-foe Microsoft during its antitrust battle.

"Larry's in the spotlight lookin' for a good sale/Chuck's in the hot seat tryin' to cover his tail."

"This is an expression of how strongly we feel that PeopleSoft needs to remain an independent company," said one of the organizers, who asked to remain anonymous because staffers are not permitted to talk to reporters.

This is the first big demonstration of organized anti-Oracle sentiment since Ellison launched the surprise hostile offer nearly a month ago. PeopleSoft Chief Executive Officer Craig Conway came out sniping at Ellison, likening him to Genghis Khan. PeopleSoft investor Cayce Balara created larryellisonsucks.org and printed up T-shirts and mugs with such slogans as "Keep Pleasanton Clean, Trash Oracle."

PeopleSoft employees, always vocal in the long-running feud with Oracle but mostly mum in the most recent standoff between the two software rivals, couldn't remain that way for long. After all, Ellison is definitely not a PeoplePerson. And these are the same people who even before the current hostilities joked they wanted to put bumper stickers on their cars: "Mean people suck. Fortunately most of them work at Oracle."

This colorful clash overshadows all those that precede it. Now employees are rallying around the company as it fights for survival in a shrinking technology industry. PeopleSoft's future and their jobs hang in the balance.

If Ellison succeeds in swallowing up PeopleSoft, he wipes out a key rival and becomes a major competitive threat to German software giant SAP AG, which dominates the multibillion-dollar business applications software market. If PeopleSoft keeps Ellison at bay and completes its merger with smaller software rival J.D. Edwards, it supplants Oracle as the No. 2 player in that market.

So today PeopleSoft employees will become walking anti-Oracle billboards. As Raving Daves songwriter Eric Tamm put it: "Craig went up the hill to get JDE/Looks like a pretty good deal to you and me."

Unorthodox? Perhaps. But that's the PeopleSoft way. And Dave Duffield -- PeopleSoft's nice-guy founder who grinned as employees chanted "crush Oracle" at company meetings -- undoubtedly would approve.

"This isn't something we ran by the lawyers," one of the organizers said. "These are just very personal statements of our support for PeopleSoft. It feels good to be doing this."