This is probably one of the worst conclusions to a saga that lasted for several years and was followed closely by so many people; yes, it’s true that Sun has been slowly, but steadily, disappearing from the radar as a major player in this industry, but it has also continued to innovate all the while it tried to determine its relationship to Open Source, and by extension how it was going to survive in this Great Open World.
Similarly, Oracle has been a company that — similarly to Sun — thrived on proprietary, dominant solutions while Open Source competition gradually eroded its dominance; look at how many of the world’s most popular sites are powered by MySQL and you’ll see why for some — and increasingly many — needs an Oracle licence is now completely pointless. Yet contrary to Sun Microsystems, Oracle has maintained a profitable business as large enterprises maintained their custom.
Now, in one scoop, Oracle becomes master of both Java, the ailing platform that has found so much success in the enterprise data centre and beyond, but has otherwise failed to dominate the industry (as it arguably would have, had Sun been a bit wiser with its policy from the late 90s to date) and MySQL, a company that Sun bought only a year ago. Solaris and the assortment of technically interesting (sometimes impressive), but somewhat unpopular projects such as DTrace also became part of a company that, while still profitable, is, too, in need of a complete rethink of its strategy.
Ars has a relatively concise review of what the acquisition entails and speculation on how the Open Source projects that now belong to Oracle are going to be affected. The reasoning of the report seems solid, but I feel that the stakes here are very high and the acquisition of Sun means much more to the GNU/Linux and by extension the Open Source ecosystem than what one might think with a casual look at what’s being traded. OpenOffice.org, MySQL, DTrace, ZFS and Solaris, btrfs are all projects that may, over the course of a few months, be significantly hampered if Oracle decides to pull its corporate backing (viz. resources). Open Source licences may translate to the existing code base being available in perpetuity, but in practice projects as large as these are prone to stagnation without focused, organised work by corporations.
While the Ars Technica report ends with a high note, an somewhat optimistic and simultaneously didactic chime suggesting that Oracle should seize the opportunity and do what Sun failed to do despite its best efforts, that is play nice with the Open Source community, I’m very doubtful whether a corporation such as Oracle has any incentive to do so — and even if it did, whether it possessed the skill required to remain profitable while supporting projects with the potential to destroy it. For all its worth, an acquisition from IBM, a company that has — for years — been realigning itself with service provision and with strong support for Open Source, would have been a better deal for Open Source software.
Hopefully those making decisions in Oracle will want to and be capable of finding a way. I will certainly not be holding my breath, however.