On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 9:06 AM, Steve Clark sclark@netwolves.com wrote:

I think it is more the fact the Oracle seems to be two faced in their dealings with foss as opposed to IBM.

Since the Sun acquisition, and despite the LO-OpenOffice spat (which btw the 'community' forkers destroyed the future of the former Sun StarOffice, in the name of freedom, of course), most of the former Sun FOSS projects -at least the mainstream ones- have been doing well: Virtualbox, GPL Java SE (OpenJDK), NetBeans, Glassfish J2EE server, MySQL, even while Oracle had other proprietary products in its arsenal that would overlap (ie JDeveloper freeware overlaped with NetBeans, yet Oracle continued with Netbeans development nevertheless, with v7.2 just released and extended for better PHP/C++ support).

Having said that, I wouldn't touch Oracle's propietary offerings even with the proverbial 20ft pole -mostly because I cannot afford any and there are worthy alternatives which are totally free- but Sun's FOSS projects I care about are alive and doing well (even OO under Apache's).

I recorded some of the doom and gloom predictions (ie "MySQL will die") vs the reality on a news story last year http://news.techeye.net/software/despite-anti-oracle-hysteria-firm-is-an-ope...

After that they even complied with their promise of starting to open source JavaFX 2.0 http://openjdk.java.net/projects/openjfx/

OK, now let's concentrate on CentOS... :)

FC