Hi,
I'm sure you know what happened with Sun which was adquired by Oracle, and I know you have information on what happened with OpenSolaris which in consecuence became IllumOS, some forums, IRC channels, magazines are questioning themselves about what is going to happend with OOo, mySQL, VirtualBox and other open source applications that can follow the same way OpenSolaris already took.
Since one of the super stars here at PortableApps.com is the portable version of OOo, I'm curious if John or anyone else in the programming team have already a solution in mind in the case that OOo goes private...
I'm not suggesting anything but I already started downloading and testing an OOo fork that I found in deb & exe format, just in case...
I don't think they would kill OOo or Virtualbox, as it (probably) keeps Microsoft annoyed, but maybe mySQL will be killed (though I heard that they may keep it, but then times are subject to change w\out notice).
Abiword does not suit my needs vary well, but OOo is as good as it gets w\out being proprietary. Maybe they can use one of the forks of OOo if oracle does kill\privatize it...
I'm tired of people living in their fantasy world when the clock is ticking away, and when they are unable to see reality for what it is.
Well, about mySQL, according to the TuxInfo Magazine (a Spanish magazine about Linux... obviusly... lol) those volunteers in the mySQL development team are already pointing to something called mariaDB which is a fork of mySQL, in case that Oracle close the development of mySQL just as already did with Solaris/OpenSolaris.
About OOo and VirtualBox, I don't find people taking options yet.
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
then the socket packet pocket has an error to report
I would like to think that Oracle isn't planning on bringing humanity to it's knees and try to squeeze every penny they possibly can out of us. Just making mySQL alone proprietary could potentially cause some real problems. I think people would turn their back on Oracle pretty quickly and look for alternative forks (as has already been suggested), so that wouldn't be very smart from a business perspective. At least it seems that way to me. I think a better business model is for them to offer premium services (such as support) for open source applications, aimed at mid to larger corporations, possibly even a "pro" version of products. This model seems to work well for other business. However, in all honesty, it's anyone's guess as to what Oracle's plans are.
That that the communities of OOo and Virtualbox have taken action yet because they have not heard any bad news or have been neglected (yet), but the those respective communities probably do fear Oracle a little.
I do agree with Darkbee's Comment above, I don't think that they would harm those projects; for example, OOo has a somewhat big user base and tons of Linux distributions have OOo as a major part of their offerings.
(live from a Fedora 13 VM)
I'm tired of people living in their fantasy world when the clock is ticking away, and when they are unable to see reality for what it is.