Re: Oracle buying Sleepycat, JBoss, and

On 2/15/06, Christopher Browne <cbbrowne(at)acm(dot)org> wrote:
>
> The world rejoiced as kaare(at)jasonic(dot)dk (Kaare Rasmussen) wrote:
> >> - Perl users usually depend on DBI; an "attack" on DBI could make
> >> PostgreSQL "less usable" for them.
> >
> > How do you see an attack on DBI could be possible? AFAIK DBI has the
> same
> > license as Perl, is released on CPAN and i behaving like any other CPAN
> > module.
>
> If Oracle hired off all the people that have worked on the DBI
> implementation, that would make it troublesome for a team to emerge to
> continue to support it. There would be a "learning curve" period, at
> the very least...
>

It's nice that this was mentioned because it's true with all open source
projects regardless of the license. Sure, PostgreSQL's IP can't be bought
and used for ransom (like GPL'd stuff), but a commercial company hiring ALL
the developers would certainly put some control restrictions on the open
source project. Of course, anyone that wasn't hired and remained with the
open source project could probably make a killing in support and
contributions :)

The GPL, while nice in its intent, sucks for businesses. This is especially
true when companies like MySQL aren't responsible and base a majority of
their product on a ton of IP they don't own. Who gets screwed? It's
actually MySQL's customers. MySQL could go out of business, oh well. But
the customers that wanted to ship an embedded MySQL now have to bow down to
Oracle whether it's directly or indirectly.

-Jonah