[Charlug] Oracle buys Sun

[Wiggins d'Anconia]

Ryan Sawhill wrote:
> Honestly, I haven't been paying much attention to Oracle *at all* over the
> years. This whole thing was pretty startling for me, though I don't have
> vested interests on any side really. However, Oracle's CEO is not someone
> that gives me warm fuzzies:
> 
>> Point-blank question, point-blank answer: "No. *If an open source product
>> gets good enough, we'll simply take it*...Once Apache got better than our
>> own Web server, we threw it away and took Apache. So the great thing about
>> open source is nobody owns it -- a company like Oracle is free to take it
>> for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that's
>> what we'll do. So it is not disruptive at all --you have to find places to
>> add value. Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be
>> insane."
>>
> 
> http://www.betanews.com/article/Sun-goes-down-Larry-Ellison-disrupts-the-software-landscape-again/1240263478
> 

I won't go so far as to say it is "warm fuzzies" but really, other than
he has a kajillion dollars behind it, what is wrong with the above line
of thought? I suspect the focus is on the word "take" and it is rather
striking, but its also way overloaded in this context. "Take" implies
gathering onto oneself without leaving anything behind, but that just
isn't possible in the OSS world, at least when a proper license is
chosen, so MySQL's crappy OSS licensing aside, it's just not possible to
"take" an OSS product, that is their beauty after all. So how is what he
said any different than any other company that uses and distributes
(legally, like RH maybe?) an OSS product? Just because he comes out and
actually states his intentions doesn't mean we should burn him at the stake.

Though I do have to wonder, as the article half implies, "This time
around, the handwriting was on the wall for several years, and this
morning, the handwriting is on the dotted line." It does beg the
question of why Larry would be looking to build a cost savings stack
coming out of a recession rather than in between or going in to
one...but then maybe he doesn't think we are coming out of one, which
would be far scarier to me than any software dealings he might have.

--
http://danconia.org