Bye, Bye Oracle!

We will really miss you… not!
Okay, so I was kidding. Oracle isn’t in any real danger of disappearing, they make too much money from supporting their enterprise customers. They also have a ridiculous amount of highly skilled developers under their roof, it just seems like management is the real issue.

The programming community has become more wary of anything that Oracle does now. They recently sued Google over the use of Java api’s in Android and were shut down by a judge whom also happened to be a programmer. Judge Apatow, you’re a hero. You helped to uphold the right’s of programmers everywhere and stopped a dangerous precedent from taking place. It would be the equivalent of making hamburger sales illegal by assembling them in bun, condiment, veggies, patty, cheese then bun order. It was ridiculous.

Oracle has essentially been the opposite of Sun in their dealings. Of course, Sun had to sell themselves to Oracle so that may not be a 100% bad thing. Still, I learned how to program in GW BASIC using a Sun Workstation in middle school. Sun will be missed and it’s kind of awful that OpenIndiana is a project of necessity and love instead of just love. With Oracle discontinuing OpenSolaris, closing the source and only selling Solaris (poorly) we no longer can use one of the greatest works to come from our departed but beloved Sun Corporation.

Now MySQL, a backbone of the webs LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) configuration for websites is being abandoned by more users and organizations everyday. It’s very important that linux distro’s support MySQL for it to continue to exist. Since most of the web is served by linux servers, a switch to MariaDB by the biggest players will form its’ eventual death. Sure, admins and organizations can continue to use Oracle’s product but why bother when they can get better support and integration with a tool that’s going to receive a larger amount of support and development in the future and is arguably a good stand-in replacement for MySQL now?

Oracle needs to stop pissing on the hand that helps to feed it if it truly cares about making money. They can’t just take everyone else’s work, slap their name on it and try to sell support for everything. Or can they?