The rising Phoenix?

Did the Phoenix ever exist? Is open source/free software as real as the rising Phoenix? Or is it as mortal as any other corporation.

Oracle, which claims itself second only to Microsoft, boasts itself to be acquiring on an average a company every month. Hmm... I wish I had pockets as deep as that to go on a shopping spree as Mr. Ellison. Lately, their acquisitions have been of the interesting kind - Open Source!

Two key acquisitions - InnoDB and Sleepycat (not to be confused with Phoebe's Smelly cat song.). InnoDB was/is the original engine that runs MySQL most popular open source database used by Yahoo! Finance, Craigslist, Evite just to name a few and the M in LAMP. Interestingly, Oracle first made a futile attempt at acquiring MySQL itself and when MySQL refused they pulled the floor underneath (read: InnoDB).

How does InnoDB and Sleepycat help Oracle? Low end cheap skeptical customers (read: people like me) who want to hog on everything free. But, at the same time Oracle has shaken the water for MySQL and removed competitions like InnoDB and Sleepycat for its own database. Whatever happened to anti-competition/trust laws???

Another one bites the dust. IBM's acquisition of Gluecode another OPEN SOURCE. Takes away the competition for Websphere.


Yet another one bites the dust. Red Hat licks off JBoss.

Events to watch out for, Oracle salivating at Novell (Mothership of Open source) and Suse Linux.

Oracle really stands out as the bad boy and a spoil sport here. When all non-softees are targetting for the softees market Oracle is starting a squabble in its own yard. Oracle acquiring Novell will also upset IBM make life harder for Red Hat then what will be left. Google. Watch out what this bad boy is upto.

The biggest challenge for Oracle at this point IMHO is the integration of such huge acquisitions. The advantage that Oracle already has acheived is market access and less competition.

What is going to happen to Apache Webserver? Hmm... I wonder if BEA or IBM is eyeing them.

At the end, there is no free lunch.

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