Re: Oracle buying Sleepycat, JBoss, and - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

On Sun, 12 Feb 2006, Bruce Momjian wrote:

> Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>> On Sat, 11 Feb 2006, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>>
>>> This highlights one of our vulnerabilities.  Oracle bought InnoDB to
>>> attack MySQL, and we don't think we have a similar vulnerability.
>>>
>>> But there is so little money made in open source that small amounts of
>>> money (by Oracle standards) can easily gain control over companies that
>>> have embedded themselves in open source projects.  Basically, to the
>>> extent these purchases can be used to harm MySQL, they can be used to
>>> harm us too.
>>
>> How?  What external projects (or companies) do we rely on for our code
>> base?  As far as I know, we've been very careful about this, with the
>> biggest one that ever gets mentioned time and again being the whole
>> readline stuff ...
>
> Ah, it isn't what we rely on, but the tools and languages our users rely
> on to make PostgreSQL useful.

Ah, okay ... stuff that would not only affect us, but pretty much anyone
using any OSS software on the Internet ... ie. gcc, java, php, perl,
python, ruby, etc ... most of which are in 'the public domain', not in a
commercial one, so it would be fairly difficult for Oracle to "buy them
out from under the community" ...

The thing is, if Oracle were to do a concerted effort to kill any of the
above, the 'bad karma' aspect would definitely backlash against them,
*but*, unless they took them *all* out, ppl would just migrate to one of
the many other options (as painful as it might be to some), or you'd see
alot of projects forking off the 'last stable OSS version' ...

hell, out of the three that we've been talking about from that press
release, the only one taht concerns me is the Sleepycat/Berkeley DB one,
since that is the foundation for *alot* of projects out there ... everyone
has been focusing on 'how this affects MySQL', but aren't looking too
closely at their own usage:

    sendmail / postfix both use it for their various tables
    cyrus imapd uses it for its mail databases
    cyrus sasl2 uses it for its primary authentication database
    spamassassin uses it for its bayes database

according to FreeBSD ports:

    subversion uses it
    openldap server uses it

Now, in alot of cases, the various server(s) also have extensions to allow
for other backends, but, for instance, there are several 'maps' within
postfix that I know haven't been converted to using an SQL backend of any
kind, but still rely on Berkeley DB ...

So, if you are going to be "concerned" about any of Oracle's acquisitions,
one should just look at their own desktop/servers to see how much the
SleepyCat one will potentially affect them :(

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664