Oracle Open world is starting once again in San Francisco, gathering more and more public every year, that’s perhaps normal considering that oracle is buying a new big company every year.
Oracle OpenWorld is the world’s largest and most important conference for Oracle technologists, business users, and partners.
Perhaps you think: i’m not intested in Oracle database so why should i care ?
Sorry but you are really wrong here, take a look at the List of acquisitions by Oracle and perhaps you’ll start to think that also your business, or just your desktop, after all run some oracle softwares.
Which one ?
What about Openoffice, one the best (or the best ?) office suite for Linux (and also for other OS) is now branded by Oracle.
i’ve read blog enthusiastic of this change, like this one, the main point for the author is: Beat microsoft Office, 50 or 60 $ are worth the assistance and support sold by oracle for OpenOffice:
“Please do sell Open Office, Oracle. You are a larger software company than Microsoft. Pour your profits back into marketing and supporting the free software projects. This will be a good revenue stream for you, you look innovative, and you get community good will. WIN-WIN-WIN.”
The main point for me is: Will Oracle be so ready in invest in Open Source ? After all the company best product is his Database, and is not so Open for what i know.
Just in case, keep an eye also on Go-oo project.
Go-oo (previously called ooo-build) is a concentrated set of patches for the cross-platform OpenOffice.org office suite. Go-oo is also one of OpenOffice.org variants created from these patches. It has better support for Office Open XML file formats than the official OpenOffice.org releases produced by Oracle Corporation and other enhancements that have either not yet been accepted into the upstream Sun version.
Mysql
MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. it’s used as database by a lot of online site and blog and from January 2010 is become property of Oracle, yes the company that sell Oracle Database.
All sites that run WordPress, Joomla or Drupal for example, or most of online Forum are wrote to be used with Mysql, so you understand that potentially if Mysql would disappear (this could just means change license or stopping development) that could be a big problem for a lot of people., luckily members of the MySQL community have created several forks such as Drizzle, OurDelta, Percona Server, and MariaDB. All of these forks were in progress before the Oracle acquisition (Drizzle was announced 8 months before the Sun acquisition).
Of these forks at the moment my favourite is the MariaDB project, MariaDB is a community-developed branch of the MySQL database, the impetus being the community maintenance of its free status under GPL, as opposed to any uncertainty of MySQL license status under its current ownership by Oracle.
The intent also being to maintain high fidelity with MySQL, ensuring a “drop-in” replacement capability with library binary equivalency and exacting matching with MySQL APIs and commands. It includes the XtraDB storage engine as a replacement for InnoDB.
Its lead developer is Monty Widenius, the founder of MySQL and Monty Program AB.
Virtualbox
VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). VirtualBox is available in 2 releases the closed source, USB driver, official support and get the new feature and the OSE edition, available as GPL.
As stated in my former article i use and really like Virtual Box, but also if “everything goes bad” the KVM/Qemu solution is available for the desktop as GPL solution, so perhaps this is the product i’m less worried of lose.
Java
And this could be in my point of view the biggest problem, what will happen to the (former) Sun JVM ? Oracle bought also Bea company, that means that also another JVM is under their control, jrockit, so what’s the backout plan here ?
OpenJDK is probably the best answer here, but if you have used it you also know that at the moment this JVM is far behind the other 2 for enterprise use, but i see also that is improving fast, also with backing of Red Hat.
Oracle in the news
But perhaps this is just a rant for someone too suspicious on closed source company, but please keep in mind what happened just 1 month ago (more or less):
August 2010 : Oracle sues Google over Android and Java
Oracle issued a press release late Thursday saying it has filed suit against Google for infringing on copyrights and patents related to Java, which Oracle acquired along with Sun Microsystems earlier this year. The terse release claimed Google “knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle’s Java-related intellectual property.”
As conclusion i just hope, to be wrong and that Oracle can continue collaborate with the community, if you go to San Francisco have fun at the Oracle “Open” World, and drop me a comment if you see a nice talk.
Popular Posts:
- None Found
