Office Software Politics

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 11:09:24AM -0400, Christopher Browne wrote:
> And they may not care about that, vis-a-vis the "open sores" stuff.
> (Somehow, it seems appropriate to use that normally perjorative term
> in this case.)
> 
> I think Oracle were interested in two things:
> 
> a) Java, which bodes some amount of ill for people with dependency on
> it.  (And as I know you're a non-fan of Java, I expect you don't care
> very much about this :-).)
> 
> b) Sun's hardware business, to extend Oracle's "integrated offerings."

Certainly that part makes sense, although it seems they are already
pissing of their hardware business customers in many cases.

> All these other side things are just side matters.  Oracle has enough
> lawyers on staff that they can readily throw a few at the bigger OSS
> projects, to try to capture some value and/or control.  But it would
> be a mistake to consider that "strategic."
> 
> > Of course I am personally hoping Oracle succeeds at killing off Java.
> 
> Hmm.  a) ?  :-)

Of course.

> The thing to watch out for is Oracle's involvement with the Linux
> kernel, which, of course predates this.
> 
> OCFS and BTRFS are interesting, but I have always been wary about
> them.  How Oracle behaves over the next little while seems likely to
> punctuate why one might want to be wary...

Well Oracle does have an interest in using Linux as the OS to run their
database on top of and the point of BTRFS is to get a decent filesystem
to do so.  Oracle certainly does NOT like Microsoft and would rather
not depend on them for an OS to run Oracle on.  I doubt Oracle thinks
Solaris will ever become popular enough to be worth the bother.  But as
long as it does anything Linux doesn't, it will be worth a bit of effort
to keep it going (even if they don't put much effort into improving it).

I don't think Oracle can harm Linux and it would not serve any advantage
for them.  Oracle is as far as I can tell not interested in being in the
OS business.  They may in fact understand that operating systems are a
commodity and not a viable market (Only Microsoft thinks it still is).

-- 
Len Sorensen
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