On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 05:25 -0700, Craig White wrote: > On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 12:14 +0000, Alan Cox wrote: > > > OO.o started as a fork from Star Office which initially was not open - > > > but a Sun Product that they bought from some other company. > > > > Sun bought StarOffice and then open sourced it. Not really a "fork". > ---- > and it now has an installation base far greater than they could have > ever imagined. > > MySQL already has the installation base despite all the best efforts by > MySQL to muddy the waters. I got to speak to a senior level Sun architect about this yesterday. Note that this guy is NOT a Sun spokesperson and what I got were his own opinions. That said, this guy drinks heavily of the "Sun Kool-Aid", so I believe his opinions are telling. Generally speaking, the first thing he brought up about the acquisition was Oracle, followed almost in the same sentence by Weblogic. I would therefore say that the person saying this has something to do with Oracle and BEA is probably spot on. Of interest, he also spoke of that the are intending to compete with Linux as opposed to anyone else. If you don't think Sun sees Linux as a threat, you're smoking something. Side Note: I find that amazingly ironic after loading up a virtual instance of Solaris Express DE the other day. It looked amazingly like Linux - from Gnome to bash instead of ksh (OK - so the home directories were in /export/home instead of /home), and with "Java Everything" splattered all over the place. Anyway, he grudgingly acknowleded after some pointed persuasion from me that their true competition was in Redmond and that they should pay closest attention there. I also told him that Sun should be careful with licensing lest the community fork the code and run elsewhere with it - something he also acknowledged quickly. Based on thst, I'd say MySQL is probably safe and this will be a good thing overall. I'd love to see it included as a component to OOo - it makes a lot of sense. Time will tell... Cheers, Chris -- ==================================================== In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. --Yogi Berra
