What does the purchase of Sun Microsystems mean for the future of Open Source?

[pokerfan]

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/20/oracle-to-buy-sun-hold-on-to-your-hats/">Oracle To Buy Sun

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Oracle said the deal is valued at $5.6 billion excluding cash and debt. Oracle is calling Sun’s Java “the most important software” it has ever acquired. The deal, which is expected to close in the Summer and was unanimously approved by Sun’s board of directors, has massive implications for the future openness of Java and MySQL.

[RoyGBiv]

1. Huh ...

Well, my knee-jerk reaction is that Oracle is evil and that the sun will be shrouded in an ashen fog, that blood will run like rivers, and the Earth will fall from its orbit.

But, tentatively, for OpenSource in general I don't think it means a great deal. Java will still be Java, only it will be centered on its use in Oracle systems rather than Sun systems, but since Sun systems are now Oracle systems ... you get the picture.

The thing to watch is what happens to mySQL. It may well fall into abandonware in the not too distant future, or an Oracle-centered fork that is built to integrate into Oracle's systems my arise and get the funding while the mainline is left in a basement.

I guess it's sort of a wait-and-see thing right now.

But watch out for the orbit shifting thing ...

[pokerfan]

2. The "cyber cynic" paints a bleak picturee

MySQL is dead. Long live MySQL. Oracle doesn't have much to say about MySQL. Why should they? They're going to quietly kill the open-source DBMS as fast as possible.

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Sun's other open-source programs. I have a bad, bad feeling that Oracle is going to let popular and powerful open-source projects like OpenOffice and VirtualBox wither on the vine.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/the_five_biggest_changes_out_of_sun_oracle

[RoyGBiv]

3. Yeah, well ...

This is all mostly stunned navel-gazing now coming from those who've built their careers on Java and mySQL while fostering a white hot hatred of Oracle. They're holding resume's that, in a fit of pique, they are now thinking may not mean anything in the world's worst job market in almost a century.

Like I said, they may well let mySQL die inasmuch as they really can. The source is there and open, and anyone can still use it and further develop it if there's enough demand. This is the cool thing about OpenSource. It's very, very hard just to kill as long as some significant group wants it to stay alive.

Abandoning certain of those projects would completely undermine any benefit of Oracle acquiring Sun in the first place. Virtualbox and OpenOffice specifically are central to what made Sun valuable and worth purchasing as they compete directly with Microsoft, which is what Oracle does. To use a military analogy, it'd be quite dumb for Oracle to pay for a mercenary army and then not let that army use its weapons.

This won't kill OpenSource or negatively impact it in any significant way. It may kill future development of mySQL and change Java quite a little bit, but those are different things.