IBM has an RDBMS horse in the OSS race (Called "Derby").  It doesn't seem to 
have much of a following.  I imagine they must have forseen the possiblity of 
an Oracle takeover when they broke off their own acquisition proposal earlier 
this (?last) year.  I agree there is probably more to come.  That's why I posed 
the question.
Netbeans is probably in the weakest position.  It already has strong OSS 
competition from Eclipse (originally IBM sponsored), and IBM, Oracle, and uSoft 
all have in-house IDEs.

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Thomas 
Dowling
Sent: Monday, April 20, 2009 10:42 AM
To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] can code4lib survive Oracle's takeover of Sun?

On 04/20/2009 10:13 AM, Barnett, Jeffrey wrote:
> I know the answer is yes, but does anyone care to speculate on the
> impact of Oracle's takeover of Sun, which controls in addition to open
> source workhorse JAVA, MySQL, OpenOffice, and Netbeans (all of which
> complete with proprietary products from Oracle).


Meh.  I don't know the intricacies of Java or NetBeans, but with MySQL, a
non-nurturing environment at Ora-Sun will either lead to a fork handled by
someone more invested in it, or a gradual move to PostgreSQL; if that spurs
some development to simplify psql, it's arguably a win all around.

OO.o development doesn't seem to be in the fast lane as it is, so I'm not sure
it could suffer much if Sun bails on it.  And isn't IBM contributing at least
as much as Sun these days?  Maybe it needs something like this to shake it up.


-- 
Thomas Dowling
tdowl...@ohiolink.edu

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