Practical Technology

Goodbye, OpenSolaris. It’s been fun knowing you. Unfortunately for you, it’s become all too clear that your new parent company, Oracle, doesn’t want a thing to do with you. I predicted that Oracle, which is a Linux company, was going to let OpenSolaris die from neglect, but most people disagreed with me. Folks insisted that [...]

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When Oracle bought Sun, there were many unanswered questions about Sun’s open-source portfolio of programs. Over a year later, we still don’t know, for example, if OpenSolaris is going to have Oracle’s support. We now know, however, that OpenSSO, an open source access management and federation server platform, will live on as a product under [...]

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The deal is done. Oracle now owns Sun. Oracle’s main message to Sun’s customers seems to be “Don’t worry, be happy.” That’s not easy when Oracle is not explaining in any detail what it will be doing with open-source software offerings like MySQL, OpenOffice, and OpenSolaris. In general, we know that Sun’s software product catalog [...]

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The EC (European Commission), the European Union’s top competition authority, isn’t crazy about Oracle buying Sun. You might have thought it was just open-source advocates objecting to the deal out of the fear that Oracle, the world’s biggest proprietary DBMS (database management systems) company would close down the most popular open-source DBMS. You’d be wrong. [...]

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The big money software companies, like Microsoft, still rely on proprietary software for their profits. Things are changing though. While businesses like Microsoft and Sun are seeing their profits and growth decline, pure open-source play companies like Red Hat are actually gaining customers and profits in a down economy. Take Red Hat for example. In [...]

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