[Malvern] Well, that's it for Sun Microsystems.

[Guy Inchbald]

MySQL has already forked. Sun started making their advanced new features
proprietary, so the originator Monty Widenius left Sun a little while
ago and created a fork called MariaDB. There is also a fork called
Drizzle, and possibly others. Sorry I have lost the links to follow up,
but Google is your friend.

OOo (OpenOffice.Org) has also sort of forked. Go-OOo is an unofficial
(i.e. not sanctioned by Sun) enhancement which the maintainers had hoped
to feed back into the OOo source, and which is apparently the version
you get with debian lenny - even though my debian version info doesn't
say so.

IMHO the big question is the one hanging over java - will Oracle make
the same kind of mess that Sun did, or even worse, or (one can always
dream) actually fix it?

--
Cheers,
Guy Inchbald


On Tue, 2009-04-21 at 16:51 +0100, Stuart "Sslaxx" Moore wrote:
> Paul Potter wrote:
> > Interesting thinking.
> > 
> > 2009/4/21 Geoff Bagley <geoff.bagley at btinternet.com>:
> >> There's always the hope that someone will write a FOSS equivalent ( e.g like
> >> Open Office is to MS Office etc.)
> 
> MySQL is under the terms of the GPL. Even if Oracle did want to bury the 
> commercial version of the software, someone could always fork it and 
> carry on like nothing happened.
> 
> Similarly with OpenOffice.org and VirtualBox. Even if Oracle were to go 
> "these are non-core products and are to be discontinued with immediate 
> effect", someone else could just take over the code and carry on. With 
> OpenOffice.org, Novell would be in a prime position to take over as 
> primary maintainer (due to their own existing fork).