Oracle is anti-OSS

hehe... I drove past their offices near Woodmead earlier this morning. They have a massive sign up there that says "Number One Middleware Provider".

Nothing like admitting that you make all your money leeching off other people's creations.

TBH... I have never had a need for Oracle products.
 
I can see The Register headline now...... "Proprietary enterprise software provider in Open Source hate shock"

I have a lot of respect for Oracle & their products, but they've never claimed to be shining paragons of OSS, I don't know why anyone ever thought they would be.
 
What is the def of OSS really? Richard Stallman (RMS) has an extremist view of what it is, and he is one of the founding fathers of OSS or more accurately FOSS. My guess is you can twist what OSS means as much you like as long as you comply to the word of the law, and not necessarily the spirit of the law, in this case the license agreement.
 
oracle is playing with fire. if they do this to mysql, a call to arms from the underground will pretty much wipe them off the face of the planet.
 
The beauty of OSS is that if Oracle kill OpenOffice (which they inherited when they bought SUN) and MYSQL is that it can be forked and people can carry on developing the open source versions.
 
bleh69 said:
oracle is playing with fire. if they do this to mysql, a call to arms from the underground will pretty much wipe them off the face of the planet.
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They won't do it overtly, they'll just quietly decrease funding and stop hiring new devs. Eventually the MySQL devs will tell Oracle to get its act together and Oracle will tell them that if they don't like it, they can go off on their own.

Honestly, did anyone really expect Oracle to continue funding a free open-source RDBMS when they're a company that made their money selling a proprietary RDBMS?

hawker said:
The beauty of OSS is that if Oracle kill OpenOffice (which they inherited when they bought SUN) and MYSQL is that it can be forked and people can carry on developing the open source versions.
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Except that OOO and MySQL agreed to be bought by Sun because they needed funding to continue development. If Oracle chucks those projects out, they don't have funding again and development will suffer (assuming Google or another company doesn't pick them up).
 
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The next to fall victim was the PostgreSQL database
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Just to clarify, PostgreSQL is and never has been part of Sun or Oracle. Sun provided build servers vir PostgreSQL, but these were very quickly replaced with alternatives.

PostgreSQL is as strong as ever and business as usual. It's MySQL that you should be worried about, as that's now owned by Oracle.

Sources: http://planet.postgresql.org

--deckert
 
Although Oracle are being real dicks on this whole Android issue, they kind of do have a point:

Java was developed with a "write once run anywhere" policy. Google's VM breaks this policy.

But, on the other hand, if Sun didn't let Java ME stagnate so much, there wouldn't have been a need for the Google JVM...

I'm in two minds here... :/
 
bleh69 said:
oracle is playing with fire. if they do this to mysql, a call to arms from the underground will pretty much wipe them off the face of the planet.
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Extremely unlikely to happen. Corporates will continue to purchase Oracle products no matter what they do to MySQL. Also, as far as I'm aware the 'underground' prefers PostgreSQL anyway. :)
 
This article has no factual basis.

This article is not correct, Oracle has a history of contributing to OSS:
  • Over here are 18 OSS projects just for Linux
  • Here you can find an overview of their OSS contribution (PHP, Eclipse, TopLink)

This article is spreading FUD, I cannot comment on the reason why Oracle is suing Google over this, but Sun did sue Microsoft over the same thing. Also, Oracle is against software patents in principle and has made many proposals to improve the functioning of the USPTO.

The idea that this is anti-OSS or good vs bad is just plain stupid, and the author of this article is clearly biased (or research challenged). Google knew full well that it infringed on patents to get around licensing costs.

Why doesn't the author write about how Ubuntu is leeching off the Linux community, or is that not a popular / sensational topic?

Lastly, I would like to point out, I actually dislike Oracle, but less so than this ridiculously biased article.
 
http://www.infoworld.com/t/mobile-p...racles-embedded-java-business-138?source=rss_ <--- interesting take on this...

There are three versions of Java platform: the Standard Edition (SE), which is the foundation for the language; the Enterprise Edition (EE), for app servers; and the Mobile Edition (ME), for phones and embedded systems. While Java SE is open source and distributed free of charge, OEMs must pay a fee to put Java ME on their gadgets.
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Claims Orcale is bleak that android will kill J2ME (which is a good thing my opinion) and this was a big revenue stream for Sun that Oracle are losing out on.
 
Oracle is going down anyways. Microsoft is leading the way with business intelligence in SQL Server 2008, Sharepoint and Power pivot. And it is a hell of a lot cheaper. So Oracle can go screw themselves.
 
I am an extensive Open Source developer myself. We are not worried about Postgre as Oracle has no grip on them. MySQL is a big problem. I am guessing 80% of PHP Open Source projects rely on MySQL, if ever they had to do something bad to MySQL they will give OSS the biggest blow possible. And no, its not that easy forking MySQL the project is too big. Nor is it easy to go to the next database platform on existing projects. Take Wordpress for instance, they support MySQL elusively, the reason is DB Layers is slow, direct queries is fast. So does many other projects.

We are working hard to get our project on multiple database platforms without the cost of performance.

Long live OSS.
 
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