More bad karma for Oracle on FOSS front

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 29 September 2010 11:39

Opinion and Analysis

When will Oracle rub up the folk who contribute to MySQL the wrong way? That's the only open source project left, which Oracle inherited as part of its deal with Sun and has yet to antagonise.

Ever since it bought Sun Microsystems in January this year, Oracle has found itself facing one question: what will be the future of the free and open source software projects it acquired as part of the deal?

OpenOffice.org, the office suite, is the latest project to see some changes after Oracle took over, with a fork being announced yesterday. The project has now morphed into The Document Foundation and the suite itself has been temporarily renamed LibreOffice.

Oracle has been invited to become a new member of the Foundation and has been requested to donate the name OpenOffice.org so that the Foundation can continue to use the same name.

The development comes close on the heels of the OpenSolaris project being sloughed off by Oracle; a new group has been set up to take the code from that project and run with it.

Oracle has also angered people in the Java community - another of Sun's open source properties that it inherited - by forcing out the creator of the language, James Gosling.

Java was a project which Sun wanted to free up and yet control; it struggled a great deal before finally freeing up the source.

Oracle has also not made too many friends in the FOSS community by suing Google over Dalvik, its implementation of a JVM.

MySQL is the only open source project which Oracle inherited from Sun and has - as yet - done nothing to merit a negative reaction.

In many ways, Oracle makes a bigger contribution to open source than, say, Canonical. It does contribute a sizeable amount of code to the Linux kernel - to serve its own ends, but then every company looks after its own interests.

But nine months after it started running the properties it acquired as part of the Sun purchase, Oracle has certainly not earned any good karma in FOSS circles.

It has shown one characteristic which everybody knew it possesses in spades - the ability to focus on money-making projects to the exclusion of everything else.

Every time Oracle makes a false step, its competitors - Red Hat and Novell - rejoice. The latter more so, because it has more to live down in the FOSS community after signing a patent licensing deal with Microsoft in 2006.

One thing is abundantly clear with the OpenOffice.org move - Oracle has yet to learn that with free and open source software, ownership is not absolute; creating a good environment for development is more important than wielding control.