Dan Scott wrote:
In the context of the Oracle-Sun and MySQL/OpenOffice/yada yada parent thread, Derby demonstrates that a software project can 1) go from proprietary to open source, 2) be contributed to by (in some ways) direct competitors, and once it is open source 3) lose commercial support from one company but gain it from another, and 4) survive for whoever depends on it and wants to continue using it regardless of what commercial entities may do.
It also shows the dangers of this to the user community though, since by your description Informix ended up forked into Derby and JavaDB, with the commercial support being for JavaDB, but the open source development taking place in Derby, and the open source development being kind of stunted too. A situation which is not great for the users.
Still, it could have been worse. To make it better would take (or have taken) concerted effort from the user community -- which probably would have happened if Postgres and MySQL didn't exist, making an open source Derby more important for more people.
Jonathan
