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Two of the world's biggest IT companies have announced this week their intention to combine as Sun Microsystems agrees to be bought by Oracle. (for the full story see here). This represents a pretty major shift in the industry's tectonic plates. It positions the acquisitive Oracle, generally known as an enterprise database vendor, as a head to head rival to IBM across the enterprise software, hardware and services stack.
Sun Microsystems has been a significant supporter of Open Source software. As well as open sourcing Solaris, Sun's own Unix operating system, It originated the Open Office project in 2000 and recently acquired the popular Open Source database MySQL, so my concern is what will Oracle's stance on open source be? OpenOffice is not a threat to anything Oracle currently does but it may not see any value in continuing to support the project, but MySQL is widely used and ubiquitous on the web being the "M" in LAMP - the acronym that describes the Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP open source software stack which underpins a major chunk of the internet. Will the database vendor continue to support an open source rival to it's core product range? Will MySQL be killed by Oracle, will it become "Oracle lite", or will the Open Source community fork the product? Time will surely tell.
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hi
By: stand on 22 Apr 2009
I appreciate the concern which is being raised. The things need to be sorted out because it’s not about the individual but it can be with everyone.
stand
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