[kwlug-disc] Newbie... Playing with Linux etc...

[Chris Bruner]

A slashdot article is saying that /Now Oracle wants the community to 
prove that open source can be made profitable 
<http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/2010-April/007767.html>.
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/04/16/190256/Oracle-Wants-Proof-That-Open-Source-Is-Profitable

/I think this goes right back to the basic problem of different 
objectives/monitary systems.

Open Source has a monetary system based on code. A corperation has a 
monetary system based on dollars. If all the people who are involved in 
an open source project are hired by one company, how can a project be 
forked in order to keep it open source? The brains needed to maintain 
the project are competing against their own workplace, and I'm sure 
non-compete clauses would limit them. So the brains have to come from an 
outside source. 


/
/Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 1:50 PM, Chris Bruner <cbruner at quadro.net 
> <mailto:cbruner at quadro.net>> wrote:
>
>     John Van Ostrand wrote:
>
>         Terry, I appreciate the point of view of not blindly
>         defaulting to the common choice. I also have that pet peeve as
>         well, just not about MySQL.
>          
>
>     Any thoughts about Oracle and mysql, and the possible future
>     problems with that?
>
>
> I am going to cover some of that in my presentation on May 3rd.
>
> In a nutshell:
>
> Oracle already owned the transactional InnoDB engine that MySQL runs
> on for several years, before they acquired Sun. If they had wanted to kill
> MySQL then, it would have been easy to do it. They did not.
>
> More importantly, MySQL is GPL. Oracle can only change the license for
> future versions, but can't retake what is already out there. There are 
> several
> community efforts based on the GPL version (will detail them in the
> presentation).
>
> Oracle can be several things, but they are not dumb. They know that there
> is a market that their own DB can never dominate (web sites, startups, 
> ...),
> so they seem to want to keep MySQL alive for this, and perhaps have an
> easy migration path to their own DB when someone outgrows MySQL.
>
> If you were in their place, would you kill MySQL only to see PostgreSQL
> take its place in that market place? These users will never go from
> cheap/free and open source to expensive and closed source and dependent
> on a commercial product. Or do you try to influence what is there?
>
> As always, time will tell ...
> -- 
> Khalid M. Baheyeldin
> 2bits.com <http://2bits.com>, Inc.
> http://2bits.com
> Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.
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