So, I realize that I’ve not said anything on the subject for a while. I’ve rather been gathering my thoughts, and am honestly still not quite sure what I think about this.
To be honest, I don’t like Sun. I really don’t like the way they ran their business. I don’t like the unix applications they developed, and I really don’t care for Solaris. Overall, pretty much everything that they built themselves, I find incredibly sluggish and antiquated. There were some cool ideas in recent years with Zones and other such OS novelties, but in the end, I think it was too little to late.
Having said that I don’t like Sun, here’s the real problem I have with all of this. I positively hate Oracle. I don’t like the way that they buy every competitor, I don’t like the fact that they never truly integrate their offerings. I don’t like that they charge way too much for their products which are, in my experience, mediocre. A company of that scale, development power, and funding should be able to produce so much better, especially with the arms and legs that they’re ripping from their customers. I positively HATE Oracle.
You may be thinking that this would just seem like a wash, One company I don’t like is getting eaten by a company I hate. That’s reasonable. But here’s another problem. Sun owned some things I really support. And do to poor marketing strategy and forsight on their part, tried to act like RedHat and leave their OpenSource development and ideology alone. I’m talking about MySQL and OpenOffice.
OpenOffice: This is not really a huge deal in my book. I don’t use it. But I do support it. It’s a good office suite for free, and compatible with Microsoft Office. It is easily the best system available for Students or anybody else that can’t afford to pay the ridiculous prices that Microsoft wants for their office suite. I hope they don’t touch it, but knowing how much Larry likes competitors and money, he may try to improve it, charge more than Microsoft for it, and try to take on Office. Our translate it into a SaaS type offering for companies so they don’t need Office any more, and can just tell their employees to go to their own OO website to do their work. Like Google Docs for the enterprise.
MySQL: I think that this is really starting to show itself as the only strong competitor in the database market to the Oracle DB. This isn’t because it’s necessarily the best DB architecture, or that it’s as good as the Oracle DB, which, I hate admitting, can be very very good. The thing is that it’s free. Very very very free. And is actively developed in the Open Source company. Lastly, I use MySQL a lot. A whole lot of the Apps that I use are backended on it. It’s easy to use, it’s simple, there’s an awful lot of support and it’s great. And I just know that they are going to try and kill it. The are having web conferences with their customers, freely available, to talk about how much better Oracle DB is than MySQL and how much money users will save by switching. This is a bad sign to me. I’m not usually pessimistic in my future predictions but I’m very worried that they will try to cut off developer access to it in the next several months, and within the next year, release a new version under a non GPL license and start charging for it. I think it might get corporatized like Xen is being by Citrix (bastards). I could be wrong and hope I am. But I seriously think that Oracle is the devil.
There are other things I worry about, such as Java, which will now be owned by them. But I expect that this will still be actively developed and open-sourced as it needs to be available to people who want to use the Oracle products. They could charge, but I think Larry knows that that will just push users over to new products that will develop that don’t use Java. Already, their pricing methodology is burdensome on customers.
I don’t really know what to think. I’m overjoyed to see Sun die. They thought their shit was solid gold, and it was high time for them to die. I hate that oracle is taking them over. I would have been much happier if it had been IBM, or if RedHat had bought them, I think that would have been excellent, though I don’t think they had anywhere near that kind of capital. In the end though, we’ll just have to wait and see how bad it is, and either way, I still have every intention of taking Oracle down someday. Not sure how, but damn if I don’t want their head on a spike!
