A Challenger Appears

It had always seemed as though there were some set-in-stone enemies and allies of the open source world with a few Switzerlands thrown into the mix. The enemies were always organizations like Microsoft (along with its supporting companies), SCO, Adobe, and the entire video game industry. The allies were always similar to Red Hat (FBOW), Google, HP, IBM, Pantek, Sun Microsystems, MIT, and to a point Nokia (somewhat love-hate). The neutral parties were those like Apple, Nvidia, ATI, VIA Technologies, Palm, and the USA Federal Government. Recently, much of this changed.

The first major change was HP's acquisition of Palm. This put an excellent, mobile, Linux-based operating system at HP's disposal, and HP announced that it was going to be distributing WebOS with several consumer devices. The next big change was Nokia's open sourcing of Symbian. This made Nokia a far more committed open source ally. The big fish however was the purchase of Sun Microsystems by Oracle.

Previously, I had been rather pleased by this news. I figured that Oracle's deep pockets would bolster Solaris, MySQL, Java, and OOo to new heights. I also figured that this purchase would allow Oracle to compete head-on with Microsoft and Apple. After all, having two top notch operating systems, a few databases, a programming language, an entire hardware division, and a first class office suite in your arsenal is rather impressive. Apparently, Oracle had other things in mind. Java users and developers are now going to have reason to be worried about Java's legal implications at every turn. Despite Java having been open sourced by Sun, Oracle has filed suit against Google for using Java in Android. OOo looks as though its future improvements by Oracle will be closed and the same is happening with Solaris. MySQL's future at Oracle remains to be seen, but we can expect much of the same.

Luckily, Python, Ruby, and FalconPL are at points where there usage is a viable option, and each language has several advantages over Java. Of course, Java has a wider array of ready code, but the door is open for competition. OOo already has a few forks, and as such we can be assured that it will not die completely. MySQL too has a few forks and its future is somewhat assured. Solaris on the other hand, may have a murky future.

While Illumos has taken development of OpenSolaris on themselves, they want to work with Oracle in the future, and they hope to remain compatible with Oracle Solaris. While this is good for users of Solaris/Illumos, I do worry that future litigation may come down upon Illumos. Oracle has set a bad precedent, and I feel like the open source community should and will remain skeptical of everything Oracle touches. I loved the software products that Sun developed and to which it contributed, but I now feel as though those products are going to come to their painful ends in the hands of Oracle. So, we have a revised list of enemies and allies... a shorter one. Who knows how much shorter these lists could become over time?

Source: http://elevenislouder.blogspot.com/2010/08/challenger-appears.html