How Long Will Oracle Stick With Open Source?

snydeq writes "The fact that Oracle has handed over the keys to two major open source projects in recent weeks has some questioning the fate of other prominent open source projects Oracle took on in the wake of its 2010 acquisition of Sun. But while OpenOffice.org and Hudson provided little commercial opportunity for Oracle, it appears that Oracle has plans to keep rein on NetBeans, MySQL, and GlassFish contrary to expectations, analysts contend."

Oracle bought Sun for MySQL

[JabrTheHut]

Oracle won't release MySQL. MySQL is a long-term, strategic threat to their primary product, Oracle database. 10 years ago in the finance sector in London every database was on Oracle, Sybase, MSSQL or DB2. Even the most noddy little applications got an Oracle or other database license bought for them. Now, only customer-facing services get an Oracle or Sybase license bought for them - the rest got MySQL. That's a lot of money Oracle isn't making any more.

Re:Because they make money from it?

[tlhIngan]

You'll get a personal and evaluation license only for the interesting bits which are inside the "Expansion pack" : USB-2 support etc.

Also is the community version lacking some features like remote display (regardless of OS) etc.

Otherwise then money - I can imagine that VirtualBox is also a strategic project. The reason why Sun bought it firsthand...

VirtualBox OSE *ALWAYS* had those limitations.

The thing is, Oracle stopped providing two different versions - the GPL'd source version (VirtualBox OSE) and VirtualBox (commercial license). Vbox OSE never had USB 2, Remote Desktop, etc. Ubuntu etc. provided Vbox OSE with didn't have those functions.

Now Oracle just provides the GPL'd version and the GPL'd sources for it. If you want the features that were in the commercially-licensed version of Vbox, you use the expansion pack. This had the advantage that all the distros had an official binary from Oracle, and it oculd be easily upgaded to the commercial one without breaking your current OS's packaging conventions.

In a sense, Vbox 4 is much easier now than Vbox3 was.

Nothing really changed licensing-wise between 3 (Sun) and 4 (Oracle). All the stuff that was in commercially licensed 3 was moved to an expansion pack that was commercially licensed, so instead of having an OSE and commercial versions of Vbox, you just have one. Helps with code maintainance as well, which is always a plus.

And I suppose, if someone wanted to write their own versions of USB2 and RDP (yes, it used RDP, not VNC) server, they could, and it'll be easier on the new architecture.