With Oracle's lawsuit against Google regarding parts of the Java code used in the Android OS drawing interpretation of many different kinds, many of the best columns I'm seeing about it conclude the same thing that we have: Oracle's open source credibility will be forever tarnished.  Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth has said as much. Many analysts are seeing that the implications of Oracle's suit stretch far beyond the issue it has with Android. And, as the Acrossad.org blog notes, the OpenOffice suite of open source productivity applications is the next software asset that Oracle oversees to worry about.

LaTeX, pronounced “La-Tec”, is a document preparation language that treats creating many types of document files like constructing a shell script. LaTeX uses a “What You See is What You Mean” interface, far removed from the WYSIWYG word processors like Word and OpenOffice. LaTeX is a programming language, but don’t let that scare you away. Like many things in open source, the learning curve may be steep, but the view from the top is fantastic.

The time has come, following its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, for Oracle to state clearly what it intends to do with Sun's huge portfolio of open source applications, platforms and components. Analysts wondered, before the Sun deal went through, what Oracle's stance would be, and how many job cuts there might be. People are still wondering. If Oracle wants to play its cards right, it should go in the direction of total transparency here.