Over the passed few months there has been a lot of chatter about former Sun Microsystems' projects. Many have been lamenting Oracle's decisions on how best to steward these projects, and forks have surfaced. I used many of the products in question when they were maintained by Sun, and I find myself looking into a future that seems better rather than worse.
Something important has occurred here. When Oracle took over OpenOffice.org many of the developers of OOo were upset with Oracle's decisions. They forked the code base and created LibreOffice. The same happened with OpenSolaris moving to Illumos/OpenIndiana. This happened before the Oracle acquisition of Sun with MySQL and MariaDB. What has happened is that the open source community proved its unrelenting wish to remain free and open. The open source community has chosen the path of free development over the path of top-down development. While Oracle is off chasing Google and trying to get a few bucks, we've been chuckling at the futility of Oracle's lawsuit seeing as it would merely kill an already aging platform.
I now feel confident that things such as Firefox, Chrome, Linux, and the like are safe from megacorps. They're safe from the hands of those who seek to control markets and products. Users are safe to consider the software they purchase their own without fear of prosecution should they need to change the software in some or redistribute the software for some reason.
Essentially, it seems as though Oracle's efforts to close down the development processes of these projects has been met with fierce opposition. In every case, the open source community has said that it is unwilling to release control. Every time the community has said it was willing to go it alone. This is perhaps our greatest success, and not, as many have said, a failure.
5 comments:
I agree. Thank you Oracle for reminding us that we are free! (as in "Don't tread on me!") I'm more than happy to see the community step up and fight back. Oracle you could have had the strongest partner in the industry: the Open Source Community! Instead you chose to snub us. You could have had millions working on your projects FREE OF CHARGE. Instead you chose to raise a skull and crossbones flag. It's the megacorps that are the true pirates not the users. You have reminded us that we are free to invoke the GPL v-whatever and stick a fork in it at any time. We now remind you of where this code came from and who it belongs to. You will be the real losers and we have declared our freedom yet again!
This is one incredibly relevant and real example of why open source is important, and just how screwed we could be if we rely too heavily on a closed-source product for any meaningful daily tasks (such as Office or Virtualization software).
We are free, and now we have proof, ways to show people just what that freedom affords us, and why it's important.
I hadn't thought of it this way, but what you say is true. Very interesting way of looking at things :)
Even in the open source community, we as people like to have a strong leader. We like to stand behind the Leader/Business that we believe in, and when we feel as though our leader is an abusive tyrant, we aren't so loyal any more.
It is true, that Oracle could have been... well an Oracle! But because they are acting like a Microsoft, they are losing!
So, we are left to create new leadership and loyalties.
Someone needs to create an equivalent to VirtualBox. Its the best thing I've ever used for desktop virtualization. I'm not sure if it can be forked, but if it can it must be forked. Its truly awesome.
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