Is this a telling Sign for Oracle?
Submitted by david on Fri, 07/30/2010 - 22:19
I have to wonder if this is a telling sign for Oracle, and possibly giving us some indication of the future.
Oracle Pulls the Rug Out From Under PostgreSQL
I'm sure that some people would say that the telling sign was when James Gosling left Oracle. You can read his blog here, and in particular his April 9th, and April 17th entries and make up your own mind on that one.
I have spend a decent amount of time paying attention to the messages that Oracle has put out about the future of Java, Glassfish, mySQL and various products that they now own from the Sun acquisition - and I give them the benefit of the doubt, but at the end of the day, I think that Oracle is a company that is very concerned with the bottom line and their own internal strategies moreso then fostering the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) goals.
I even *gasp* skipped out on an Apple announcement to see Oracle's all day sessions on the future of the Sun assets, and my first takeaways were written here: Finally – someone who sees it like I do. After watching the various Oracle webinars, and then going back and seeing the more detailed session they did on Java tools – I couldn’t help but to come up with my own “What they meant to say” phrases. I essentially think that NetBeans and Glassfish are on their way out as we know them, but they want to make sure to maintain enough control over them to avoid the forks. Instead they want to groom those customers for the borg – and will do that slowly over time so they don’t realize what is happening to them. Glassfish is doomed
While I can understand why a company may decided that supporting a competing Open Source Software (OSS) such as PostgreSQL may not be in their best interest, the decision to not provide any notification, and just pull the plug on them shows that Oracle will look out for Oracle.
Does this mean that fading support for items such as GlassFish and NetBeans are next? I feel that they don't have enough leverage yet to make sure that current users will move over to their paid versions of App Servers and IDEs, but I'm sure that someone there is working on how to strategicly do that.
I'm just wondering if this is the first shot across the bow....that warning shot that Oracle is now done making sure that everyone feels comfortable with the acquisition and is ready to implement it's own game plan. Or is this some rash decision that someone at Oracle made that may get corrected.
I don't know enough about Oracle as a corporate culture...and they were nice enough to sponsor a Northern Virginia Java User's Group session on Spring 3 at their headquarter's here in the DC area....so I don't want to speak too soon, but I am keeping my eye's open.
Oracle Pulls the Rug Out From Under PostgreSQL
I'm sure that some people would say that the telling sign was when James Gosling left Oracle. You can read his blog here, and in particular his April 9th, and April 17th entries and make up your own mind on that one.
I have spend a decent amount of time paying attention to the messages that Oracle has put out about the future of Java, Glassfish, mySQL and various products that they now own from the Sun acquisition - and I give them the benefit of the doubt, but at the end of the day, I think that Oracle is a company that is very concerned with the bottom line and their own internal strategies moreso then fostering the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) goals.
I even *gasp* skipped out on an Apple announcement to see Oracle's all day sessions on the future of the Sun assets, and my first takeaways were written here: Finally – someone who sees it like I do. After watching the various Oracle webinars, and then going back and seeing the more detailed session they did on Java tools – I couldn’t help but to come up with my own “What they meant to say” phrases. I essentially think that NetBeans and Glassfish are on their way out as we know them, but they want to make sure to maintain enough control over them to avoid the forks. Instead they want to groom those customers for the borg – and will do that slowly over time so they don’t realize what is happening to them. Glassfish is doomed
While I can understand why a company may decided that supporting a competing Open Source Software (OSS) such as PostgreSQL may not be in their best interest, the decision to not provide any notification, and just pull the plug on them shows that Oracle will look out for Oracle.
Does this mean that fading support for items such as GlassFish and NetBeans are next? I feel that they don't have enough leverage yet to make sure that current users will move over to their paid versions of App Servers and IDEs, but I'm sure that someone there is working on how to strategicly do that.
I'm just wondering if this is the first shot across the bow....that warning shot that Oracle is now done making sure that everyone feels comfortable with the acquisition and is ready to implement it's own game plan. Or is this some rash decision that someone at Oracle made that may get corrected.
I don't know enough about Oracle as a corporate culture...and they were nice enough to sponsor a Northern Virginia Java User's Group session on Spring 3 at their headquarter's here in the DC area....so I don't want to speak too soon, but I am keeping my eye's open.

Oracle fixes issue with Eclipse
To provide some level of balance, I thought it was important to also publicize this story:
Oracle Demonstrates Great Community Support and fixes Eclipse