Oracle: what happens to MySQL and OpenSolaris?

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 21 April 2009 04:50

Business IT - Technology

From a company that was touting its own progress and supposed ability to steer itself through difficult technology waters on its own, Sun Microsystems, over a few months, became an entity that was desperately looking to be acquired.
Even though Sun did have the potential to become the biggest open source company - if it had done some long-term thinking - its stock price became a problem. And there were far too many camps within the company for any coherent line of thought to hold sway long enough to take the company in one direction or the other.

What differences will emerge in its open source projects now that Oracle has consummated the marriage and agreed on the price?

There are three main open source projects which Oracle will now inherit - MySQL, Java and OpenSolaris. What happens to these three under Larry Ellison?

One overriding factor is plain: Oracle will pay close attention to any Sun product that will enable it to consolidate its position in the business space. Anything else will rate a poor second.

Oracle already sells Red Hat Linux - stripped of its trademarks - under the name Unbreakable Linux. It is unlikely to move away from this product, given the extent to which Linux is favoured when it comes to servers in the business market.

OpenSolaris still depends very much on its ties to the parent; the main attraction of the project has been the lure that, some day, a developer could have the freedom to experiment with all the features that Solaris possesses.

But OpenSolaris still has a few miles to go before all the features that have created the demand for Solaris are part of its own bloodstream. It is not all there yet.

The licence under which OpenSolaris is released is still the Community Development and Distribution Licence and one cannot imagine Oracle changing it. This licence has kept developers away as it does not give them even the half the freedom that the GPL does.

While the first release of OpenSolaris, in May last year, created some kind of buzz, the second, in November, passed mostly under the radar. In short, OpenSolaris has not become important enough for Oracle to consider it a major plus point of the acquisition.

How long will Oracle keep it going? When will Ellison decide to "turn over the project to the community?" And how long will said "community" continue to play with a toy that is 75 or 90 percent of the original? Will there be an OpenSolaris after two years?