Candyland Gets Paved. Again. Repeatedly.

I'm getting a bit tired of being so curmudgeonly. I can't help it tho. All my toys are being taken away.

First Novell acquires SuSE Linux, which I have been fairly skeptical of since the purchase was announced. Then Nokia ate Trolltech, the place where my favorite Qt was grown. And then Oracle ate Sun Microsystems, the ones who kept expanding the boundaries of software engineering and releasing such leaps to the public (usually (sometimes)). Now Oracle is smacking around robust and growing projects that have served the software engineering good for many years now.

And now Novell is bought by Attachmate, with 882 patents being absorbed by a Microsoft subsidiary. The openSUSE team says everything is "business as usual,", but there are very strong indications that this will not always be so.

Maybe this is just the ebb and flow that is technology capitalism... but all my power tools seem to be disappearing. If Apache and JBoss are bought by Philip Morris, I'm going to freakin' lose it.

Is Oracle Doing what Sun Couldn't? I Can't Bring Myself To Think So.

I'm staring at my mug with the image James Gosling created - Tux standing in front of Sun's gravestone, consoling Duke's loss. Sun left us too early... it was always an amazing playground of tech, giving us cool stuff like Jini and JMX. I was ill at ease with Oracle before their acquisition of Sun, and now I'm even more so.

Still... I noticed that Oracle recently has done something that Sun hasn't been able to do. While Sun tried to govern Java with some sort of loose democracy known as the Java Community Process, it never was able to get consensus with the group and move forward. Perhaps Oracle's benevolent dictatorship is what the JCP needed - for now they have been able to get IBM to join forces with them and work on development of the OpenJDK.

This is a pretty big deal, as Gosling notes. Not only does this collaboration accelerate open Java development but this also possibly reduces fragmentation since IBM will be scaling down their work on the Apache Harmony JVM. RedHat's IcedTea implementation is already married to the OpenJDK codebase, and without IBM's backing of Harmony the OpenJDK implementation quickly becomes a de facto standard.

If Oracle can light a fire under the JCP and put significant engineering efforts around an Open Java development tookit... I dunno. Maybe things will turn out all right after all. I'm still pretty hesitant.

Candyland Gets Paved

I've been a big fan of Java for quite a long time, using it for nearly all my enterprise software development. Looks like I'm going to have to find something else now.

Today Oracle announced it would purchase Sun
Microsystems, the company that had previously played host to a myriad of great technologies such as the Solaris OS, the Java programming language, the NetBeans integrated development environment, the MySQL database, VirtualBox for desktop virtualization, the GlassFish application server (not to mention an emerging JMS server) and OpenOffice.org for open-source enterprise office software. With Oracle's purchase pretty much a done deal, you can now expect most, if not all, of these technologies to wither on the vine.

I rely on NetBeans, Java, Solaris, OpenOffice and VirtualBox so that I can do my job on a daily basis. With those removed, I'm pretty much screwed.

Think I'm being alarmist? Maybe. I did play Chicken Little when Novell bought SuSE in 2003, and that deal appears to be working out somewhat better than anyone expected - even amidst poorly considered kinships with Microsoft. SuSE is slowly recovering, and Novell seems to attempt to be a good steward. But Oracle? Lessee... what's their track record for aquired technologies? They've turned Tangosol Coherence from a must-have element in a distributed software stack into a minuscule trinket tucked away in their closet. InnoDB has not progressed well and has caused continue enterprise issues. And WebLogic? It used to be the fastest Web service platform out there, now it remains largely ignored.

Tell me... what strategic value is Oracle going to find in VirtualBox? Or OpenOffice.org? Do you really think Oracle would have allowed projects such as Hibernate to exist when they want to make Toplink ubiquitous? Oracle will continue to neglect these projects, just like they've ignored previous projects they've acquired, until they decompose.

Seriously, are you going to trust a company who's had the same impossible-to-navigate site for fifteen years? A company who attempts to license its products using terms that require a slide rule and burnt offerings to figure out? Just look at the difference of how each company announced the acquisition: Sun created a micro-site that explains the deal and attempts to sell a bright side. Oracle could hardly be bothered to post a statement, showing their indifference to the acquisition that will most likely just mean a reduction in competition, not an enhancement to their portfolio.

Right now it seems there are two possible outs: hope that Apache Harmony can deliver on its goal of releasing its own open Java platform, or abandon Java as a platform and move to something like Qt.

Maybe I'm prematurely freaking out. Maybe I'm wrong about Oracle's apathy destroying the projects acquired from Sun. I certainly hope so. Still, I would wager that the capitalist will continue to decimate good ideas, digesting Sun's properties into a discarded pile alongside acquisitions of olde.