Dan Scott wrote:
>
> In the context of the Oracle-Sun and MySQL/OpenOffice/yada yada parent
> thread, Derby demonstrates that a software project can 1) go from
> proprietary to open source, 2) be contributed to by (in some ways)
> direct competitors, and once it is open source 3) lose commercial
> support from one company but gain it from another, and 4) survive for
> whoever depends on it and wants to continue using it regardless of what
> commercial entities may do.
>
>   

It also shows the dangers of this to the user community though, since by 
your description Informix ended up forked into Derby and JavaDB, with 
the commercial support being for JavaDB, but the open source development 
taking place in Derby, and the open source development being kind of 
stunted too.  A situation which is not great for the users.

Still, it could have been worse. To make it better would take (or have 
taken) concerted effort from the user community -- which probably would 
have happened if Postgres and MySQL didn't exist, making an open source 
Derby more important for more people.

Jonathan