OStatic

It seems like there's been little but bad news and resignations coming from Oracle since it finally managed to close the deal on Sun. Finally, there's good news in that Drizzle seems to have a bright future ahead. It just isn't with Oracle.

Turns out, there's plenty of interest in the fledgling database project. Specifically Rackspace is investing heavily in Drizzle for its Rackspace Cloud. Jay Pipes, Monty Taylor, Eric Day, Lee Bieber, and Stewart Smith have all landed over at the hosting company to work on Drizzle. According to Pipes, Rackspace sees Drizzle as the answer to problems that MySQL can't solve:

If you follow open source news at all, it's been pretty hard to ignore MySQL the last few months. With a desperate campaign to stop Oracle gobbling up MySQL, the FLOSS poster database has been front and center. As usual, the PostgreSQL community has been quietly coding away and working on the 8.5 release scheduled for the first quarter of 2010.

However, one of Monty Widenius' arguments about the vulnerability of PostgreSQL has caught the attention of the PostgreSQL community. In a comment on OStatic, Widenius says that PostgreSQL can also be killed by a company like Oracle:

Let it never be said that Monty Widenius gave up without a fight. Widenius hasn't given up hope of blocking Oracle taking MySQL as part of its Sun acquisition. He started before the holidays by calling for a letter writing campaign, and has stepped it up with an Internet petition and a personal email campaign to recruit signatures. Here's hoping it will fail.

It probably wouldn't be fair to call it spamming, but he's gotten pretty aggressive by emailing (in his own words) every person that I have ever communicated with regarding MySQL. You might not agree with Widenius, but at least you have to credit him with tenacity.

Oracle's lingering takeover of Sun Microsystems stands to do a lot for Sun, but at the moment, the lifeboat is just out of reach. As a result of its continuing losses, Sun is dramatically slimming down ? several thousand of the company's employees won't be returning after the New Year's break.

Cutting employees, of course, means cutting the things they work on, and that could spell trouble for some of Sun's less profitable ventures.

Michael Monty Widenius wrote a nicely-worded response in the comments to my previous post Oracle, Mysql and the GPL: don't take Monty's word for it , and I thought it deserves more visibility, so I'm quoting it below. For the record, I am in agreement with Steven O'Grady of Redmonk, who wrote that Monty just wants to get the band back together and that dual-licensing isn't the only way to make money from MySQL. What I objected to was what I felt was a conflict of interest that hadn't been seriously reported. That, and I dislike how this brouhaha has resulted in unfair attacks on the GPL.

?Click the read story button to see Monty's comments.

In the continuing soap opera of Oracle's battle against the European Commission for the right to acquire Sun, and with it, MySQL, we have had to rely on the bloggers and analysts to get it right, because the media surely has not. Before you read any further, stop right now and read Matthew Aslett's excellent summary of Oracle-MySQL through last week, Pamela Jones' excellent piece on the matter (and her later update), and Matt Asay's highlighting of Monty Widenius' conflict of interest in opposing the Sun acquisition.

One of the more damaging consequences of this case is the opportunistic piling on against the GPL license. Every BSD Tom, Dick and Harry with an axe to grind about Richard Stallman, the GPL, and GNU has stepped up to the plate, on cue, to deliver unsubstantiated rants against the GPL. I suggest that readers follow the money and look into the reasons why each party takes the stance it does. Oracle's bias and intent in all of this is pretty clear, but the opposition has not been so forthright.?

The European Union held its meetings on Oracle's acquisition of Sun last week, and the decision should be forthcoming by January 19th. In the meantime, MySQL creator Monty Widenius is calling for a letter-writing campaign to help save MySQL from Oracle's clutches. At the same time, Oracle has been moved to put up a list of commitments regarding MySQL should the company be successful in acquiring Sun.

According to Widenius, Oracle's promise to put money into MySQL development is not proof that anything useful will ever be delivered or that MySQL will remain competitive. Widenius also argues that a fork is not enough to keep MySQL healthy without cooperation from Oracle as the primary copyright holder.

According to the New York Times and Bloomberg, IBM's purchase of Sun Microsystems is imminent. The official announcement and terms of the acquisition will most likely be made public on Monday, but a late in the day announcement hasn't been ruled out. It's estimated that the purchase will cost IBM nearly $7 billion.

There's been much speculation and discussion both here at OStatic and elsewhere about what this means for Sun and its open source projects.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that IBM is currently in talks to purchase Sun Microsystems. The acquisition is not a foregone conclusion, due in part to the very different corporate cultures in the companies. Some believe this tension will ultimately help both companies succeed, if they can just get through the talks.

The acquisition could take place as early as this week, and it is speculated that IBM could pay over $6.5 billion for Sun. Sun's recent financials have been more than a little disappointing, and this purchase would take a toll on IBM's profits in the short term. Business isn't solely about the short term, however, and I can't help but agree with the WSJ, CNet's Matt Asay, and at least a few of those involved in the talks that this acquisition would be a positive one for IBM, Sun, and open source in general.