[Sussex] Oracle Sun USA says yes

[Geoffrey Teale]

On Aug 21, 2009, at 8:24 PM, Andrew Guard wrote:
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>
> In my mind NO. This is a very bad thing and isn't good thing for Java,
> OpenOffice.org and MySQL. The majority of work on these projects are
> done by Sun and from my view it isn't to the advantage of Oracle to
> support the projects in the long run.

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I don't think it's as clear cut as that, we have to see what happens.

Sun was a company in a long slow death spiral so the future of those  
projects was never secure.  Moreover Sun's relationship to open source  
was never 100% transparent, though they would claim they were the  
single largest contributer over the years that really depends on what  
licensing terms you're prepared to accept.  Plus contributing vi was  
just an obvious attempt to undermine all that is right and good in the  
world (just kidding vi kiddies! ;-) )

I had similar concerns when Oracle bought Sleepycat (the authors of  
Berkley DB) and yet they still maintain the project and the licensing  
arrangement just as it was.   Oracle is also a committed vendor of  
Linux, and one of the biggest vendors of Java based tools out there.   
They have some vested interest in keeping those things alive and  
running well.

If we instead look to good possible outcomes of this deal, one might  
be the true opening of OpenSolaris code (i.e. GPL compatible  
licensing).  Though the Linux community is now working on comparable  
projects there's no doubting that mature code from DTrace and ZFS  
would be a nice addition to the Linux arsenal.

Still, as I said, we'll have to wait and see.

-- 
Geoffrey Teale
tealeg at member.fsf.org