Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 1st May 2009 21:44 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
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The codebase can be forked so it doesn't really matter what Oracle does.
Oracle can withdraw development resources and infrastructure. People always wave their hands cavalierly and say, "Oh it can just be forked." Developer resources are not so plentiful as some seem to believe. Probably the most common phrase I hear in the FOSS world is "Our project needs more devs". And Oracle could very well pull that support. MySQL would no doubt continue. But its development would likely be stunted. And it's not like MySQL is already a full-featured enterprise class DBMS. (And anyone who thinks so is in serious need of a reality check.) It still has a hell of a lot of development needed to add required features and bring the ones it has to maturity.
Oracle could do *a lot* to cripple MySQL... forks or no.
Edited 2009-05-02 02:36 UTC
Even if they were to fork it, and enough devs came onboard, it would still mean the end of Opensolaris as it exists now. The two codebases would diverge in a relatively short time, possibly marking the end of the cooperation between the two branches. Opensolaris would likely not get features from Oracle Solaris, and neither would Oracle's Solaris integrate much from Opensolaris, and thus would Opensolaris end in spirit if not in fact.
It was nice while it lasted. I'm hoping Oracle will surprise us, but I'm not holding my breath. There's really no advantage for their business by continuing to support anything related to Opensolaris, and I wouldn't be surprised to see new features in Solaris become proprietary.





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