Barnett, Jeffrey writes:
> I know the answer is yes, but does anyone care to speculate on the
> impact of Oracle's takeover of Sun, which controls in addition to
> open source workhorse JAVA, MySQL, OpenOffice, and Netbeans (all of
> which complete with proprietary products from Oracle). I haven't
> heard anything quotable recently from Larry Ellison, but he has in
> the pass been an ardent opponent of OSS and I find it hard to
> imagine him not taking advantage of this opportunity to place
> roadblocks and/or booby traps in the way of the OSS community.
I foresee a forkfest. Which of course is the beauty of Free Software:
even if the copyright is acquired by an Evil Empire, they can't stop
us from continuing to develop from the last freely-released version
onwards. There will still be Java, MySQL, OpenOffice and (I suppose
it can't be avoided) NetBeans -- the only questions is how much Oracle
proposes to involve themselves in the maintenance and development
process.
_/|_ ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/ Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com> http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\ "Stay tuned for exciting news about chicken zygapophyses" --
Matt Wedel.
Received on Mon Apr 20 2009 - 11:09:06 EDT