Re: Oracle purchases Sleepycat - is this the "other

At 2:15 PM -0400 2/14/06, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>On Tue, 14 Feb 2006, Scott Marlowe wrote:
>
>>On Tue, 2006-02-14 at 10:51, Leonel Nunez wrote:
>>>Rich Shepard wrote:
>>>>On Tue, 14 Feb 2006, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>Oracle purchases Sleepycat. From what I understand, BerkeleyDB was the
>>>>>"other" way that MySQL could have transactions if Oracle decided to
>>>>>restrict InnoDB tables (after purchasing Innobase last year).
>>>>
>>>> From what I read a few days ago, Oracle is negotiating with
>>>>Sleepycat, Zope
>>>>(is that the PHP developer's name?), and one other OSS developer.
>>>>Nothing is
>>>>yet signed, and they could all fall through.
>>>>
>>>>Rich
>>>>
>>>
>>>Zope is a Python framework
>>>Zend is for php
>>
>>Also, given the license of PHP, which is NOT like the GPL, but much
>>closer to the BSD license, I doubt Oracle could manage to buy it and
>>kill it or hide it or whatever.
>
>As of this moment, if Oracle buys Zend, they could effectively kill
>PHP ... the core engine that PHP is built around is a Zend engine,
>so if they were to revoke the license for that, PHP would be dead
>... kinda like MySQL with InnoDB ... now, there was talk at one
>point time with replacying that engine with Parrot, so I'm not sure
>how hard/long it would take for them to do so if Zend got pulled out
>from under them ...

Zend isn't, last time I looked (which, granted, was ages ago), needed
to run PHP, but it may be now. The license that's in php 5.1.2 makes
it look like, while you might have some naming problems, php would be
safely available regardless of what anyone might do to the Zend
people.

Parrot was certainly functionally up for running PHP last summer, and
it seems unlikely that it's not still ready. (Granted, someone would
still have to write any libraries that PHP provides that aren't
written in PHP, and write a simple compiler for it, so it wouldn't
happen tomorrow, but it's certainly doable)
--
Dan

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