These are strange times we live in …

Oracle and Sun …

  • Tim Bray’s analysis (I originally called this link a “nice” analysis, but somehow it seemed wrong to use the word “nice” given the topic).

In truth I’m not much worried about the impact on MySQL itself (we use postgres), but it is, as many have said, a poster child for the open source movement. Some of the commentators that Tim links to mention the fate of Berkely-DB since Oracle got it. Sadly, I think that’s the future that awaits MySQL: slow decline by organisational neglect - mind you, perhaps that’s no different than slow decline in affordability by increasingly aggressive renewal cost increases.

The immediate potential impact that worries me most is upon OpenOffice … which I’ve begun using as my default choice for most things (over MS-Office), primarily because, gasp, it’s better (and it obviously produces xml that could be, in extremis, consumable - unlike the MS-Office XML mess). I hope that Oracle, who have no track record in this space, can maintain the momentum (both in the free version and the commercial version).