oracle is buying sun. oracle is into databases in a big way. sun is home to sparc, solaris, java, open office, and recently, mysql. a lot of people have been blogging about what will come out of this marriage. i’m just wondering about what will happen to open office, mysql, in that order.
oracle doesn’t really need mysql. it is, after all, a huge database company. maintaining a free open source sql database such as mysql may just eat away at the markets of its other database products. so mysql may be spun off or, more logically, ultimately die under the care of oracle. i’m not really worried as i know that mysql has been forked already so the line will go on.
what i’m really wondering about is what will oracle do with openoffice? oracle is known to be one of the top contributors to linux because it ultimately contribute’s to the company’s income. but i do not see openoffice contributing significantly to oracle’s bottom line. i reluctantly see openoffice withering under oracle which is a shame, really. should this actually happen i will be sad but not worried as there are other alternatives. as always is the case, with open source. there’s go openoffice which is an alternative build to sun’s openoffice. and then there’s ibm’s lotus symphony.
but i do hope that oracle will continue openoffice development or better yet maybe spin it off. its better than killing it off.
