The long reach of Oracle

[matt-urrlRJtNKRMsHrnhXWJB8w at public.gmane.org (Matt Shields)]

On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 10:09 PM, mark-OGhnF3Lt4opAfugRpC6u6w at public.gmane.org <mark-OGhnF3Lt4opAfugRpC6u6w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> Mostly Oracle and open source doesn't worry me. The specific case of Oracle
> and MySQL does worry me, because it is a case of them acquiring an open
> source project that has been gradually expanding into direct competition
> with their flagship commercial product. I believed, and still believe, that
> the world would have been better served by requiring Oracle to divest MySQL.
>
>
> ----- Reply message -----
> From: "Dan Ritter" <dsr-mzpnVDyJpH4k7aNtvndDlA at public.gmane.org>
> Date: Sat, Jul 10, 2010 9:41 pm
> Subject: The long reach of Oracle
> To: "Rich Braun" <richb-RBmg6HWzfGThzJAekONQAQ at public.gmane.org>
> Cc: <discuss-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
>
>
> On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 06:42:14PM -0400, Rich Braun wrote:
> > Ned Harvey asked:
> > > Are you discounting openvpn for some reason?  pfSense?  m0n0wall?
> >
> > Openvpn and these others address a much different requirement, that of
> linking
> > layer-3 connectivity.  SSL Explorer/Adito (and the commercial platforms
> from
> > Juniper, Cisco and Barracuda) are not comparable; they operate at the
> > application layer well above layer 3.
> >
> > > I'm not sure what you're afraid of.  But if you think oracle is
> unfriendly
> > > to open source, think again.
> >
> > Maybe I shouldn't be "afraid" (you chose that word, it's not quite the
> > sentiment I was driving toward in my initial posting).  Would love to
> hear
> > from others who agree with either of us.
>
> Can I agree with both of you?
>
> It's good that commercial companies hire people to work on
> open-source projects. It's bad when this is too concentrated. It
> is probably, usually, self-correcting.
>
> I'm more suspicious of Microsoft joining open source projects
> than I am of IBM. Oracle is somewhere in between.
>
> -dsr-
>
>

The original founders of MySQL (and some others) have already forked MySQL,
so if you're worried that MySQL will go away like OpenSSO then you
shouldn't.  BTW, OpenSSO (also a Sun/Oracle product) was killed, but it
forked to OpenAM.  I believe that most of the real opensource products that
were Sun/MySQL have enough interest and the license permits them to fork.
GlassFish is another example where I could see it forking.  If you look at
the latest version (3) they have removed core features from the OS version
like clustering.  I wouldn't doubt that some will come along and fork it.

-matt