Subject: [CODE4LIB] can code4lib survive Oracle's takeover of Sun?

From: "Barnett, Jeffrey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:13:12 -0400

I know the answer is yes, but does anyone care to speculate on the impact of Oracle's takeover of Sun, which controls in addition to open source workhorse JAVA, MySQL, OpenOffice, and Netbeans (all of which complete with proprietary products from Oracle).  I haven't heard anything quotable recently from Larry Ellison, but he has in the pass been an ardent opponent of OSS and I find it hard to imagine him not taking advantage of this opportunity to place roadblocks and/or booby traps in the way of the OSS community.

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From: Thomas Dowling <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:41:33 -0400

On 04/20/2009 10:13 AM, Barnett, Jeffrey wrote:
> I know the answer is yes, but does anyone care to speculate on the
> impact of Oracle's takeover of Sun, which controls in addition to open
> source workhorse JAVA, MySQL, OpenOffice, and Netbeans (all of which
> complete with proprietary products from Oracle).

Meh.  I don't know the intricacies of Java or NetBeans, but with MySQL, a
non-nurturing environment at Ora-Sun will either lead to a fork handled by
someone more invested in it, or a gradual move to PostgreSQL; if that spurs
some development to simplify psql, it's arguably a win all around.

OO.o development doesn't seem to be in the fast lane as it is, so I'm not sure
it could suffer much if Sun bails on it.  And isn't IBM contributing at least
as much as Sun these days?  Maybe it needs something like this to shake it up.

-- 
Thomas Dowling
[email-masked]

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From: Mike Taylor <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:03:23 +0100

Barnett, Jeffrey writes:
 > impact of Oracle's takeover of Sun, which controls in addition to
 > open source workhorse JAVA, MySQL, OpenOffice, and Netbeans (all of
 > which complete with proprietary products from Oracle).  I haven't
 > heard anything quotable recently from Larry Ellison, but he has in
 > the pass been an ardent opponent of OSS and I find it hard to
 > imagine him not taking advantage of this opportunity to place
 > roadblocks and/or booby traps in the way of the OSS community.

I foresee a forkfest.  Which of course is the beauty of Free Software:
even if the copyright is acquired by an Evil Empire, they can't stop
us from continuing to develop from the last freely-released version
onwards.  There will still be Java, MySQL, OpenOffice and (I suppose
it can't be avoided) NetBeans -- the only questions is how much Oracle
proposes to involve themselves in the maintenance and development
process.

 _/|_	 ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor    <[email-masked]>    http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "Stay tuned for exciting news about chicken zygapophyses" --
	 Matt Wedel.

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From: Jonathan Rochkind <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 11:24:38 -0400

The user community for these products is WAY bigger than code4lib, 
naturally.  If Oracle manages to mess them up, then the user community 
will fork, or migrate to different products, and we will follow.  
Fortunately we are not alone here, there are giant communities formed 
around these open source products, which will keep using open source 
products to fill those functions one way or another, and we'll go with 
them.

Not to imply that a custodial company who wanted to couldn't make things 
very inconvenient in the short to medium term, sure. But it's just 
speculation at this point, I don't see any reason to get alarmed.  And 
one way or another, it'll work out in the end.

Jonathan

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From: "Barnett, Jeffrey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 11:29:50 -0400

IBM has an RDBMS horse in the OSS race (Called "Derby").  It doesn't seem to have much of a following.  I imagine they must have forseen the possiblity of an Oracle takeover when they broke off their own acquisition proposal earlier this (?last) year.  I agree there is probably more to come.  That's why I posed the question.
Netbeans is probably in the weakest position.  It already has strong OSS competition from Eclipse (originally IBM sponsored), and IBM, Oracle, and uSoft all have in-house IDEs.

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Thomas Dowling
Sent: Monday, April 20, 2009 10:42 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] can code4lib survive Oracle's takeover of Sun?

-- 
Thomas Dowling
[email-masked]

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From: Dan Scott <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:35:17 -0400

On Mon, 2009-04-20 at 11:29 -0400, Barnett, Jeffrey wrote:
> IBM has an RDBMS horse in the OSS race (Called "Derby").  It doesn't seem to have much of a following.  

Heh. So, IBM bought Informix, contributed an overhauled version of
Informix Cloudscape to Apache as Apache Derby, and then mostly got out
of the Apache Derby business a few years later when they stopped
offering paid support for IBM Cloudscape (the IBM-branded redistribution
of Apache Derby), although I believe it is still used as a persistence
layer by many IBM products. 

At the same time that IBM was getting out of the paid support business
for Apache Derby, Sun was busy investing heavily in it (in terms of
developers) and wound up embedding it in Java SE Development Kit under
the branded name "JavaDB". 

The Derby mailing list still generates a fair bit of traffic. It's
certainly not as high-profile as, say, MySQL or PostgreSQL. 

In the context of the Oracle-Sun and MySQL/OpenOffice/yada yada parent
thread, Derby demonstrates that a software project can 1) go from
proprietary to open source, 2) be contributed to by (in some ways)
direct competitors, and once it is open source 3) lose commercial
support from one company but gain it from another, and 4) survive for
whoever depends on it and wants to continue using it regardless of what
commercial entities may do.

I hear there's at least one good book about Apache Derby out there,
although it's rather dated now...

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From: Jonathan Rochkind <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:49:37 -0400

> commercial entities may do.

It also shows the dangers of this to the user community though, since by 
your description Informix ended up forked into Derby and JavaDB, with 
the commercial support being for JavaDB, but the open source development 
taking place in Derby, and the open source development being kind of 
stunted too.  A situation which is not great for the users.

Still, it could have been worse. To make it better would take (or have 
taken) concerted effort from the user community -- which probably would 
have happened if Postgres and MySQL didn't exist, making an open source 
Derby more important for more people.

Jonathan

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From: "Cloutman, David" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:59:11 -0700

I don't know if there is anything that can be done about it, but if
anyone is interested, I've set up a Facebook group opposing the merger. 

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=91044005659

---
David Cloutman <[email-masked]>
Electronic Services Librarian
Marin County Free Library 

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
Barnett, Jeffrey
Sent: Monday, April 20, 2009 7:13 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: [CODE4LIB] can code4lib survive Oracle's takeover of Sun?

I know the answer is yes, but does anyone care to speculate on the
impact of Oracle's takeover of Sun, which controls in addition to open
source workhorse JAVA, MySQL, OpenOffice, and Netbeans (all of which
complete with proprietary products from Oracle).  I haven't heard
anything quotable recently from Larry Ellison, but he has in the pass
been an ardent opponent of OSS and I find it hard to imagine him not
taking advantage of this opportunity to place roadblocks and/or booby
traps in the way of the OSS community.

Email Disclaimer: http://www.co.marin.ca.us/nav/misc/EmailDisclaimer.cfm

---

From: Dan Scott <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:21:42 -0400

Taking this even further off-topic from code4lib (oh, hey, Archimedes,
an institutional repository developed by Université Laval up here in
Canada, ran on Apache Derby - whew, back on topic briefly!):

> stunted too.  A situation which is not great for the users.

Naw, no forks, and apologies if I represented it that way. JavaDB and
IBM Cloudscape were just cuts of Apache Derby from the apache.org
project that people for which people and companies could purchase
honest-to-goodness support. It's a standard business model; much like
multiple commercial companies exist that can offer support for Apache
Solr. Nobody lost or has lost in the Derby community so far simply
because some companies found a business opportunity in offering support
and packaging.

Mind you, there's nothing in the Apache 2 license that forces companies
or indviduals to contribute modifications back to the mother project. It
just didn't / doesn't make business sense to invest that amount of
effort to maintain the fork. It's enough work trying to build a set of
regression tests for one project without having to worry about forks.

> Derby more important for more people.

I, uh, don't know about that; its sweet spot really is as an embedded
database, although it's okay as a server for single-disk partition
databases for applications that use only JDBC to connect to it. Which
makes it a pretty niche database, in comparison to PostgreSQL and MySQL.

---

From: Joe Hourcle <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:09:58 -0400

> http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=91044005659

I doubt that joining a facebook group is going to actually do anything in 
the matter.  If you actually have specific reasons for not wanting the 
merger, I'm guessing that there's someone to write to at the FTC or DOJ or 
whatever other government agencies have to approve these mergers.

If they decide that the merger would harm competition, they can (must?) 
reject the merger.

-----
Joe Hourcle
Principal Software Engineer
Solar Data Analysis Center
Goddard Space Flight Center

[insert disclaimer here about these being personal comments, and not those 
of my company or place of work]

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From: Ross Singer <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:43:12 -0400

> although it's rather dated now...

I have a copy.  Signed by one of the authors!

-Ross.