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Barnett, Jeffrey writes: > 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). I haven't > heard anything quotable recently from Larry Ellison, but he has in > the pass been an ardent opponent of OSS and I find it hard to > imagine him not taking advantage of this opportunity to place > roadblocks and/or booby traps in the way of the OSS community. I foresee a forkfest. Which of course is the beauty of Free Software: even if the copyright is acquired by an Evil Empire, they can't stop us from continuing to develop from the last freely-released version onwards. There will still be Java, MySQL, OpenOffice and (I suppose it can't be avoided) NetBeans -- the only questions is how much Oracle proposes to involve themselves in the maintenance and development process. _/|_ ___________________________________________________________________ /o ) \/ Mike Taylor <[log in to unmask]> http://www.miketaylor.org.uk )_v__/\ "Stay tuned for exciting news about chicken zygapophyses" -- Matt Wedel.