The Dismantling of Sun

The Fall of OpenOffice.org

I wrote the following at the start of November.

Over thirty developers bolt from OpenOffice.org to join LibreOffice. [Here.] More will no doubt join them as the days pass. This will wither OpenOffice.org as its open-source backing (Google, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Novell) also bolts to LibreOffice.

I doubt this will bother Oracle. It is evident that Oracle is trying to disburden itself of any open-source projects. OpenSolaris is dead, but resurrected as Illumos. Now OpenOffice.org is about to die, but already resurrected as LibreOffice. Will MySQL be next?

MySQL Doomed Next

What do you know? MySQL was next! From The Register:

Oracle has hiked up the price of MySQL, killing low-priced support options and more than doubling what it charges for the commercial versions of the database.

A MySQL annual subscription on a server will now start at $2,000 for standard support, after Oracle's killed Sun Microsystems' basic and silver packages, which started at $599 and $1,999.

The increase hits startups, small-to-medium businesses, and those on a tight budget hardest.

The article goes on to report that the price hikes will bring about fear and anxiety about the future of MySQL. You know, they should have gotten a clue when the original creators of MySQL bolted from Sun and started their own forks, esp. MariaDB. Given that MySQL alternative, PostgreSQL, is less popular and more of a pain to learn, I myself may have to switch to MariaDB to get away from the uncertainty of MySQL.

The Folly of Oracle

It is obvious, that Oracle is pulling its Sun properties to pieces, driving out all of its developers, including Java inventor James Gosling OC. I figure that, by the end of 2012:

  1. MySQL will be dead, its user and developer bases divided mostly between MariaDB and PostgreSQL;
  2. OpenOffice will be dead, its user and developer bases mostly absorbed by LibreOffice; and
  3. Java will become moribund as Google forsakes it for its own Go language; most other open-source companies abandon it, too; and the engineering schools (like MIT and Purdue) stop using it as a teaching language.

The Revolt of Apache

After I wrote the above in a work log entry the Apache Software Foundation, most of whose projects are Java-based, went on the offensive against Oracle with an ultimatum to the Java Community Process: Uphold our rights as implementers of Java, or we will leave the JCP, effectively abandoning Java. [Here.] If the ASF carries out this threat, it would probably freeze most of the its projects, at least until the ASF finds for them a substitute for Java.

The Fall of Java?

This threat has been expounded on [Neil McAllister, The coming war over the future of Java, InfoWorld, 11 November 2010], noting that a powerless JCP — which it would become if Apache and its allies walk — is no JCP at all. The de facto demise of the JCP will break up the Java community: educators, academics, and researchers will have little incentive to remain loyal to a platform that has become foremost a proprietary product aimed at Oracle's lucrative enterprise customer base.

Go Ascends

In the end, Java may well become what C# is now: A programming language so strongly bound to a single corporation that academics and their allies in hackerdom* will forsake it for other alternatives. This will give Google a leg up for its Go language, which may well become the teaching language in universities and engineering schools, and the new alternative to C. After all, whatever it has become now, Google is still rooted in hacker* culture, and hackerdom likes it far more than either Microsoft or Oracle.