Re: Oracle buys Sun

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 2:42 AM, ovi freebsd <lists@freebsdonline.com> wrot=
e:
> Freddie Cash wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 8:42 AM, ovi freebsd <lists@freebsdonline.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> I know this is not about FreeBSD but it is about open source and it
>>> matters,
>>> maybe many of you heard about last news:
>>>
>>> http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=3D09/04/20/128246 =A0 =A0=
 =A0 -
>>> /"Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA)
>>> announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under whi=
ch
>>> Oracle will acquire Sun
>>> <http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/018363oracleharligekbtSun...>
>>> common stock for $9.50 per share in cash.
>>>
>>
>> The really interesting bit, at least for me, will be seeing what
>> happens with btrfs now that Oracle has full access to ZFS. =A0Will they
>> continue development of btrfs? =A0Will they port ZFS to Linux? =A0Will
>> they release ZFS as GPL? =A0Will they borrow ideas from ZFS for btrfs
>> and vice versa? =A0What will this mean for the rest of the OSS world
>> that is using ZFS?
>>
>>
>
> From what I know Oracle do not have a good history with open source (and =
not
> a bad one... yet)... they only took Linux from Red Hat and are making mon=
ey
> of it... I don't think they will give something back to open source
> community but... we'll see...
>

Well the reason that Oracle branched the RHEL tree was mostly due to
support issues that redhat is unable to address (i.e. they are not
able to provide the level of support most large scale oracle sites
need - it's not really their fault, they are a small company compared
to oracle).  I see no problem with a company offering support, and
patches, to a clearly open sourced project.  let the user decide who
they give their money to.

This does not even begin to address the amount of Oracle engineers
that are actually working on filesystems and patches to the linux
kernel to make it sorta stable to be able to run oracle in the first
place.  so i'm not sure one can look at a branch of rhel and deduce
that oracle is going to close up mysql

but i digress - this is the freebsd list :)  this acquisition was
clearly so oracle could ensure the future of java, and they got a
decent hardware portfolio and OS thrown in for good measure.

-p

--=20
~~o0OO0o~~
Pete Wright
www.nycbug.org
NYC's *BSD User Group
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