“With Oracle set to acquire Sun and gain stewardship over Java, there are many in the tech world with an opinion on how the database giant should handle its new relationship with the programming language. One of those opinions is being voiced by Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, who is calling on Oracle to keep Java open. During a conference call yesterday to discuss Red Hat’s first-quarter fiscal 2010 results, Whitehurst also took aim at Oracle’s operating system business.”
…any reason to believe they wouldn’t? I can’t be certain, but I believe they would probably just follow a “support” model to try and make some income from it.
Its not so much “don’t believe they will keep it open” as it is confirming that they will. When there are takeovers, such things may happen, so its better to just get a confirmation before investing to heavily into it.
However, they can just fork the current opensource version…oh wait…they did!
Wow. Customers of a company which pushes Linux exclusively tend to be more interested in moving to Linux than to OpenSolaris. I wonder if there might just be a bit of selection bias there.
I’m a Linux guy. But I consider myself to be a member of the Linux-alike community ahead of any particular subcommunity. And seeing Red Hat join the decades-long POSIX posture-and-jab-fest makes me vaguely nauseous.
Just cool it, Whitehurst, before people start mistaking you for Jim Zemlin.
Edited 2009-06-25 18:27 UTC
I think IBM, Red Hat and the Java community have too much to lose to let Oracle co-opt Java. If Oracle did take over, the community would end up using the nuclear option – forking java.
I hope Oracle drops JDeveloper in favor of Netbeans (or making their own modules for it). Netbeans isn’t that great, but at least turning off modules cuts down on the bloat. My experiences with JDeveloper have been horrible (forced to use it for a class on SQL and Oracle reports and forms).