So, Sun embraces Oracle, not IBM, in the end. Most of what I said here about IBM applies to Oracle as well. They’ve based their middleware on Java just as IBM has. And they’re perhaps even less of a charity than IBM. But Oracle also has much less experience in open source communities than IBM. Indeed, as far as I know, Oracle has very little community presence at all, and haven’t open sourced any of their marquee products.
This is causing some consternation among open source and free software advocates, who are concerned mostly about MySQL falling into Oracle’s clutches and being summarily dispatched. I’m not savvy on open source DBs so I’ll leave commentary on that one to those who know something. What might happen to Java though?
Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul thinks Oracle will be good for open source Java:
Sun’s dictatorial control over the evolution of Java has been widely criticized by other stakeholders and is generally viewed as detrimental to the language’s growth and adoption potential. The Java Community Process (JCP) has been a particularly thorny source of controversy and friction.
Oracle could finally democratize the JCP by making it more transparent and inclusive. Sun’s overt hostility towards the Apache Software Foundation’s Harmony project, which seeks to build an Apache-licensed Java SE implementation, could also finally be brought to an end.
Bad, bad Sun! Now the community can rejoice! But wait… Here’s Glyn Moody of ComputerWorld who thinks overall it will be good but perhaps not so great for open source:
The downside is that Oracle’s feelings about open source – and hence its advocacy – are probably more ambiguous than Sun’s. In particular, it seems to have very little truck with the more idealistic leanings of the free software side of things. Pragmatists might rejoice at that, but it does mean that Oracle will be aiming to use open source as a tool rather than see itself as an evangelist with a mission to convert.
Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth, in a report on a press conference after the Ubuntu 9.04 launch, is sanguine:
“I’m sure Oracle has carefully thought through everything it committed [itself] to [and] there will be no reversal of the idea that Java should be widely available and available as open source,” Shuttleworth said during a press conference today to launch ubuntu 9.04 upgrade.
“It’s a one-way trip,” Canonical chief said about the process of making software open source. “What is interesting [about the Oracle-Sun deal] is that it really cements the idea that free and open source software is the profound driving force in software today. ”
Shuttleworth is correct. Once a code base has been open sourced, the community has the power to take the code and run, if they don’t like the direction a project is headed. Having had first-hand experience with the power of community thought leaders to influence even Java, the largest and most corporate of code bases, this is a lesson Oracle will learn. Either they’ll learn it the hard way, or they’ll learn it from people at Sun who understand this stuff deeply, and whose expertise could save Oracle a lot of trouble.
Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady sums up the most likely scenario of all:
However the politics resolve themselves or not, though, the Java landscape is characterized as much by its inertia as anything else. Ergo any potential shifts in the landscape here are likely to be glacial in pace. I’d expect something very akin to the status quo for the foreseeable future.
Time – lots of it – will tell.