I just noticed that the Sun/Oracle Ultra 27 is no longer listed on the Desktops section of Oracles products page. This is a shame because I’m quite pleased with mine.
This sends a couple of messages:
It could be a purge while they bump to a new model featuring 6-core Xeons. Yet more than likely, another victim of the merger.
Monty has resorted to another round of hand-waving in his post MySQL saga. This guy is starting to become an embarrassment to the FOSS community.
Some people accuse him of “selling out” in some moral sense; this is not the case. As a technologist, I can imagine liquidity is a liberating experience as you can pass on the reigns and ultimate financial responsibility of your company and get back to the tech. He built and sold MySQL AB for $1 billion dollars. Needless to say, he and his shareholders were well compensated — probably far more than the actual “worth” of the company. It is his fault that he did not architect a sale in such a way where he’d remain supreme commander if that was his true desire. In retrospect, what he did by selling, quickly leaving SUN, and starting a fork of the code is a pretty deviant thing to do. But again, if the acquisitions agreement didn’t forbid this, there is no foul play on either side.
Sun and now Oracle have done nothing overt to prevent MySQL advancement. What’s “killing”[1] MySQL is failure to innovate. Don’t get me wrong, MySQL is a great tool and meshes beautifully to the needs of many web workloads. It powers everything from this humble blog to many enormous web properties. It’s always been the “good enough” DB and for a long while lacked rather fundamental features that big corporate systems had. Although most of these problems are shored up (and allowed reciprocal growth in 4.x and 5.0), nothing exciting has come along since 5.0. Creating work-a-like storage engines just because Oracle owns InnoDB was silly in retrospect and potentially fatal in the long-term. Sorry Monty, MySQL has never really broken out of the niche that made it so popular back in the version 3.23 days and if you spent your energy and money since innovating instead of dragging your feet this would not be the case.
I’ve been using the PostgreSQL 9 betas, and let me tell you, it meets or exceeds all my RDBMS needs. If you need a traditional database that has a rock solid history and has stepped up on the innovation front recently, take it for a spin. There are some interesting non-traditional developments as well, especially CouchDB. All in all, if Oracle does fumble[2] MySQL, the only really damage is to Monty’s ego as we have excellent alternatives.
[1] MySQL isn’t going to go away. It has simply saturated the target market and the growth curve has since flattened.
[2] I see no reason they will do any better or worse than MySQL AB, Sun, or Monty Program AB. Expect more of the same.
Granted, I’m not a Groklaw junkie. Lawsuits are the epitome of bureaucratic boring and are not a creational activity. So, keep in mind that I only read the occasional major headlines from The SCO Group’s escapade in futility. It does come as a relief that the show is finally over.
The situation in many ways paralleled the AT&T UNIX lawsuit of the ’90s. It is every bit as ironic considering, for instance, that BSD folks were largely responsible for the success of UNIX. In SCO’s case, their OS (SVr4 UNIX) is based largely on the work of Research UNIX, BSD, and even includes a wide selection of GNU tools in userland.
Except this time, no offending code was ever demonstrated, just a straw-man argument and utter defeat.
Still, I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness over the whole affair. Santa Cruz Operation and System V UNIX were respectable in their time. My guess is that SCO along with UnixWare (the natural evolution of System V) will fade into oblivion along side the countless other dead UNIX implementations. Linux zealots often take jabs at other implementations, but I think UnixWare could have held a viable, if niche, place in the enterprise had been under proper stewardship.
As time goes on, the UNIX diaspora seems to be waning. We are left with, essentially:
History has been unforgiving to those companies that try to unfairly weasel programmers and users in this market. The lesson is to work with and encourage your development community and not bite the hand that feeds. My eyes are on Oracle for the time being. Sun had a hard enough time nurturing the Solaris community despite being a favorable company, and Oracle can just as easily kill this operating system through boneheaded maneuvers if it is not careful.