IBM has an RDBMS horse in the OSS race (Called "Derby").  It doesn't seem to have much of a following.  I imagine they must have forseen the possiblity of an Oracle takeover when they broke off their own acquisition proposal earlier this (?last) year.  I agree there is probably more to come.  That's why I posed the question.
Netbeans is probably in the weakest position.  It already has strong OSS competition from Eclipse (originally IBM sponsored), and IBM, Oracle, and uSoft all have in-house IDEs.

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Thomas Dowling
Sent: Monday, April 20, 2009 10:42 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] can code4lib survive Oracle's takeover of Sun?

On 04/20/2009 10:13 AM, Barnett, Jeffrey wrote:
> I know the answer is yes, but does anyone care to speculate on the
> impact of Oracle's takeover of Sun, which controls in addition to open
> source workhorse JAVA, MySQL, OpenOffice, and Netbeans (all of which
> complete with proprietary products from Oracle).


Meh.  I don't know the intricacies of Java or NetBeans, but with MySQL, a
non-nurturing environment at Ora-Sun will either lead to a fork handled by
someone more invested in it, or a gradual move to PostgreSQL; if that spurs
some development to simplify psql, it's arguably a win all around.

OO.o development doesn't seem to be in the fast lane as it is, so I'm not sure
it could suffer much if Sun bails on it.  And isn't IBM contributing at least
as much as Sun these days?  Maybe it needs something like this to shake it up.


-- 
Thomas Dowling
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