Hot off the heels of Oracle stopping the PostgreSQL build farm servers for Solaris, Oracle released an automatic update for Java that rebrands the company name from Sun to Oracle which had the cascading effect of breaking Eclipse.
While I don’t think this is some sort of coordinated plan by Larry to bring down open source in general, I think this is indicative of the pain of integrating Sun in to Oracle and we can expect more of this in the future. On the positive side, I think the reactions by the PostgreSQL and Eclipse communities really highlight the power of the open source process. In both cases, the communities had solutions quickly in the wake of the mess created by Oracle.
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Oracle/Sun not off to a good start with open sourceTags: eclipse, open source, oracle, postgres, postgresql, PostgreSQL Community, sun microsystems
David Fetter: I was replying to the main entry, not your comment.
I don’t know exactly how to respond to your suggestion. My lack of knowledge about the potential for disruption is leading directly to my lack of an opinion
Regardless, -hackers is probably not the place for it unless there is a code issue that makes it difficult to support a platform.
@Jeff,
What perspective? I’m not saying we need to de-support Solaris even eventually, but we need to have a discussion, probably on -hackers, as to the implications of supporting an OS that’s owned by someone who sees us as a competitor. The consensus could well come down to, “Microsoft sees us a similar way,” or it could come out some other how.
From the looks of it, the breaking of Eclipse was more of an Eclipse problem than an Oracle problem.
And Oracle has little reason to support PostgreSQL when it’s got two products of it’s own that operate in the same territory. Sure, that’s annoying from our (PostgreSQL’s) perspective, but it’s not like it was a huge surprise. They could have been a little nicer about it, but that’s about it.
I’m just trying to keep this in perspective.
That Oracle can make the PostgreSQL community scramble around and do things other than work on PostgreSQL simply by turning off servers, is *not* a good thing.
We need to consider very carefully and explicitly the implications of supporting platforms owned by companies which view us as competitors.
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