The long reach of Oracle

[Rich Braun]

Early this morning I got an invitation from Oracle:

"Oracle has a long-standing commitment to open source and open standards. In
fact, Oracle is committed to offering choice, flexibility, and lower cost of
computing for end users. By investing significant resources in developing,
testing, optimizing, and supporting open source technologies such as MySQL,
OpenOffice.org, GlassFish, Linux, PHP, Apache, Eclipse, Berkeley DB, NetBeans,
VirtualBox, Xen, and InnoDB, Oracle is clearly embracing and offering leading
open source solutions as a viable choice for development and deployment."

(Amusingly, clicking on the email's purported link to the open OScon
registration site takes you first to a proprietary page that reads "Global PRM
Partner Portal - Temporary Unavailable" at the moment.)

Oracle has been quietly and not-so-quietly buying up employers of developers
of and key legal rights to the core open-source technologies of our day.

I'm concerned about where this leads.  If it weren't for the rise of open
source in its current form, the Internet as we know it would be a lot more
expensive, a lot less useful, and a lot more dominated by a handful of huge
firms, the way Big Pharma and other industries work.

Having recently seen what happened to SSL Explorer which forked into Adito and
then quietly died as the sole open-source SSL VPN (at the hands of proprietary
Barracuda Networks), and then just this week seen how TWiki has forked off
into Foswiki, it seems to me that a relatively brief campaign of FUD
(fear/uncertainty/doubt) by the marketing execs at Oracle can undermine the
entire current direction of open-source as we understand it.

Will they?  What's in their best interest?  And how would the community
respond if Oracle's words quoted above turn out to ring hollow?

-rich