More Oracle Open Source Fallout

[Ian Stokes-Rees]

On 10/17/10 10:57 AM, Richard Pieri wrote:
> Oracle has turned hostile on its supporting Open Source communities
> three times the past year so far: Java, OpenSolaris, and now
> OpenOffice. Can we really trust Oracle not to do the same with
> MySQL, VirtualBox and btrfs?


What the whole Sun -> Oracle situation says to me is that commercial
companies need to keep their eye on the bottom line, and need to have
sustainable revenue streams from their investments.  I think Sun failed
on this.

I think Open Source is great, but Sun was incapable of turning their
extensive expertise (people) and high quality products (hardware and
software) into a sustainable business, much of which was focused around
Open Source software products.  If I were Oracle, I would be forced to
say "A first order approximation of the causes of Sun's failure was
their extensive investment in products which generated no revenue."  My
conclusions would be "cut them off, or commercialize them".  In other
words, it is sad that Sun couldn't make money, and people now have to
pay for that failure.

Ian