View Single Post
  #9   (View Single Post)  
Old 21st April 2009
Albright Albright is offline
Port Guard
 
Join Date: Apr 2009
Posts: 14
Default

Ars Technica has some interesting tea-leaf reading. This writer doesn't think Oracle will kill MySQL, but not being a big MySQL fan (even though, or possibly because, I work with it forty hours a week), I really wouldn't miss it.

More interesting in my opinion, though, is this part;

Quote:
Oracle's database software is heavily deployed on the Solaris platform, so Oracle clearly has relevant business interests in the future of Solaris. Oracle is, however, also very strongly committed to the Linux operating system. Oracle sells its own Linux support services on top of Red Hat's stack and is also as a major contributor to the Linux kernel. As a major player in both worlds, Oracle has every reason to want to encourage greater collaboration between the Linux and OpenSolaris communities. I suspect that this will lead Oracle to rethink Sun's licensing decisions for OpenSolaris.

When Sun liberated the Solaris source code, the company deliberately chose a license that would make it difficult for the code to be adapted for use in the Linux kernel. Oracle will probably dual-license the Solaris code so that it is available under the GPLv2 in addition to the CDDL. This will allow key Solaris innovations—such as ZFS and DTrace—to be ported to Linux.
This is interesting, because the presence of these tools was quickly becoming a key differentiating feature between Linux and more free Unixen. I guess that's good for everyone in the long run, but as a fan of BSD and of non-copyleft licenses in general, I would selfishly be a little disappointed if this came to pass.
Reply With Quote