Re: Oracle buying Sleepycat, JBoss, and Zend

Cheers, list!

I'm here because I'm quite nervous about Oracle's monopolistic
activities. OK, I'm a .NET developer, so not as nervous as a LAMP pro,
but I'm an OSS fanboy I guess.

The InnoDB buyout was huge, as most MySQL users use this rather than
BDB for a transactional engine. With both transactional engines under
Oracle's control, I suspect PostgreSQL will get much more popular this
year. I will likely switch my personal DB use to PostgreSQL just to
stay away from Oracle.

The buyout of Sleepycat is huge, because it's used in many, many
systems. Quoting a Sleepycat developer on their blog:

"Berkeley DB is in every copy of Linux, every distro, whether it's
server, desktop or embedded. It's also in every copy of BSD Unix, so
OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc. Every copy of OpenLDAP and sendmail
uses us. Every copy of OpenOffice and StarOffice (Sun estimates 40
million are out there). 3 million Motorola cellphones. Many copies of
Movable Type, Subversion and Apache HTTP server."

So the death of BDB would be a big blow to Sendmail, OpenLDAP,
OpenOffice/StarOffice, Subversion, Apache and Motorola. That's huge.

Google also uses BDB a lot for High Availability stuff.

JBoss is more than (arguably) the best JEE app server out there. They
also run Hibernate and NHibernate. This worries me because I'm on the
NHibernate team. Would Oracle continue to support a .NET tool?

As I understand it, the Zend engine is most of what PHP is, since
PHP4. Take out Zend, and PHP becomes a shadow of its former self.

So why am I so worried? Because if I didn't make money doing C#/SQL
Server stuff I would be using OSS databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL,
open app servers like Apache and JBoss, and dynamic languages like
PHP, Python and Ruby.

OK, just needed to vent I guess.

--
Cheers,

Kevin

"Picking fights with people smarter than you
is great - you always end up learning something."
- jcooney.net