Nathan CrauseMusings of a Software Developer

A relative of mine pointed me to some news articles of how Oracle is handling the various pieces of technology they inherited from Sun Microsystems. Needless to say, it's dismal.

OpenOffice - basically on the way out. OpenSolaris - killed. MySQL - serious question marks. And now they're also suing Google for writing their own JVM for Android devices.

This all doesn't bode very well. If Oracle is willing to go after Google for having their own JVM, then it's safe to assume that OpenJDK will be shut down soon enough, all the permissive operating system licences for the JRE will be dropped (killing Java support for all the BSD's).

Larry Ellison is making a lot of enemies. He's so obsessed with monetizing everything, he's going to end up alienating everyone but his corporate clients.

I've already read how many places are dropping MySQL in anticipation of Oracle's moves there. No money to be made there. There now plenty of real alternatives to Java on the server (Python, PHP, Ruby) so there's no real strategic advantage there. Novell continues to develope their .NET VM for Linux and MacOS, so platform neutral desktop apps isn't something they can monetize (and by their own admission it's not a market they understand, anyway). Oracle has no experience (nor interest) in the mobile market, so nothing for them there. So what's his end-game here?

I've never really cared for MySQL, so that's not my biggest concern here - what's bothering me is the future of Java (if Mr. Ellison tries to monetize that, and charge for it). And not just the Java programming language - I've kept a very keen eye on Groovy and Grails (which are heavily reliant on the JVM), but if Oracle starts charging for Java then Grails would no longer be a viable low-cost open-source solution. And that carries over to a lot of other things - JRuby, Apache Derby, JBoss, Glassfish, Apache James, Jython, etc., etc. All these long-lasting open-source projects would be at risk.

I know I'm probably jumping the gun on my doom-and-gloom, but I haven't seen any positive signs out of Oracle since taking over Sun. I now wish the original rumours were true - that IBM was going to grab Sun. I think that would have been a much better fit.