If Oracle Bought Every Open Source Company 237
An anonymous reader points out Glyn Moody's thought experiment: what if Oracle bought up the entire open source ecosystem? Who would win, who would lose? And how might an open ecosystem grow in the wake of such an event? "Recently, there was an interesting rumour circulating that Oracle had a war chest of some $70 billion, and was going on an acquisition spree. Despite the huge figure, it had a certain plausibility, because Oracle is a highly successful company with deep pockets and an aggressive management. The rumour was soon denied, but suppose Oracle decided to spend, if not $70 billion, say $10 billion in an efficient way: how might it do that? One rather dramatic use of that money would be to buy up the leading open source companies — all of them."
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Informative)
We started using PostgreSQL back when Sun bought MySQL. And I can't say we've had any real complaints and actually have found PostgreSQL to be easier to maintain with less table corruption, etc..
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause#California [wikipedia.org]
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Informative)
> We started using PostgreSQL back when Sun bought MySQL
Right on. And PostgreSQL is about to remove one of the last big barriers for using it - streaming replication is coming in 9.0. Huzzah! I was just listening to a "Rails on PostgreSQL" [railsonpostgresql.com] talk from Pivotal Labs and that was cited as one of the few places where MySQL was ahead... not for long...
Re:Hmm (Score:1, Informative)
Well, you do get a shot at taking the employees all together, as a unit, which is perhaps more than you could have got otherwise. If you really want them then you try to retain them. You might also get control of the project leaders (via share agreements, some form of golden handcuffs, etc) and thus greater influence on the product and greater high-level management insight into what to do with it...