Oracle Sues Google Over Android

[Richard Pieri]

On Aug 16, 2010, at 11:01 AM, Ben Eisenbraun wrote:
> 
> It does sound like OpenSolaris will get the axe, although that hasn't been
> officially announced.

Close enough:
http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=496203&tstart=0

> I was at LinuxCon last week, and Chris Mason gave a talk on Btrfs.  He and
> the other Btrfs developers seem very much commited to improviing the linux
> I/O stack and making their filesystem competitive with ZFS, and they are
> all employed by Oracle.

Call me paranoid if you will but it causes me to worry when one company is paying developers to work on two competing products where one is in intended to be pay-for and the other isn't.

> I don't think Oracle hates open source or anything; they just seem like
> they're hypercompetitive and unwilling to give away their most valuable
> technologies for free.

It isn't that Oracle hates open source.  It's the perception that Oracle hates open source.  Sun made Solaris available for free along with source code; Oracle is taking it back and making you pay for it.  Sun gave out Java under the GPL; now Oracle wants take it back and make Google (and whoever else) pay for it.  These are not accurate statements but they have the prima facie appearance of validity.  That will have a chilling effect on both open source contributions to Oracle and future Java deployments.

> Miguel de Icaza's post on the Oracle-vs-Google thing is good:

He makes some good points -- but I do wish that he didn't turn it into a .NET promotional piece.  .NET has its own collection of pitfalls starting with the fact that the Community Promise doesn't apply to partial implementations.  Among many other things, you must implement IE's models and Microsoft's version of XML documents.

--Rich P.