With today's surprise announcement that Oracle will acquire Sun Microsystems, several questions were raised as to some Sun products, including MySQL, Solaris, and OpenOffice.org. Browsing around the net, there are several viewpoints on the future of these Sun products, and the OpenOffice.org team has even issued a statement itself.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-07-14
Good luck close sourcing mysql. Mysql's founder has already set up a separate business around a fork of mysql. If they completely close source the main branch, where do you think everyone would go? It should be noted, however, that Mysql currently does sell the opportunity for its partners to close source their modifications to mysql. They might put more emphasis that section of the business.
Member since:2009-03-19
Yeah, I have to agree. I think a lot of companies are starting to back off from their open source commitments. First, it's not really that profitable for them, and it's not as much of a PR coup as it used to be. Adding to that, with a recession in progress, there's not a whole lot of money available for altruism.
I'm thinking that the best outcome you can expect from the Oracle acquisition is that they'll release the things they can't sell for a profit into the wild. Other than that, I expect they'll to let them quietly fade away, the way Apple did with Darwin.
Realistically I think the open source movement is starting to fade, at least as far as getting any corporate love goes. There will still be open source projects, of course, but I think corporate sponsorships are going to be a little harder to come by.
I'd also agree about Sparc going away. It's been an obviously moribund platform for quite some time, and I could easily see Oracle promoting an Intel Solaris-based appliance for their low end customers, and thus avoid competing with partners like HP and IBM on the high-end RISC boxes. Continuing to develop Sparc just doesn't pass muster from a cost/benefit perspective.
Edited 2009-04-20 23:31 UTC
Member since:2007-02-17
There is precious little evidence for this. Open source development continues apace. It has an estimated 1.5 million developers/testers/other people involved worldwide. It comes out with new enhancements and applications and versions at a frenetic pace, compared with the closed source competition. It has companines buying up open source projects all over ... huge software companies such as IBM, Novell, Nokia and now Oracle.
Mozilla are a non-profit organisation, but they make pots of money from Google in order to easily fund further development. Mozilla's firefox browser (by some accounting anyway) is starting to approach 50% of the browser market on its own.
Speaking of Google ... they also develop open source code of their own, and they fund the Google Summer of Code.
OpenOffice is estimated to have about 20% of the business office suite market, and rising, and who knows how much of the home dektop market. It has had over 100 million downloads, and who knows how many installs from each download.
IBM owns the mainframe and supercomputing market, and open source is a significant presence in both of those arenas.
Linux owns the embedded market, and any number of companies are invested in that.
Open source movement starting to fade? I don't think so ... rather the exact opposite. It would appear to be gaining momentum all the time, and starting to burst out everywhere.
Microsoft appears to be busily playing whack-a-mole all over the globe desperately trying to stop it, and apparently giving away all its stuff for free in the process.
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/24477/1231/
Member since:2009-04-15
Member since:
2006-09-12
Cannot for the life of me see MySQL remaining open source & cost free. It's instant revenue for Oracle. They will likely fork the code & enhance with proprietary extensions, then quietly go about up-selling to the 10 million or so existing MySQL users.
OpenOffice? What use has Oracle for an open office suite? Perhaps they will leave it alone as a PR exercise.
The Sparc is dead. Long live the Sparc! Oracle may have a use selling pre-built turnkey systems though...