An Era comes to an end: Sun acquisition by Oracle complete

By Eric on January 31, 2010

Sun Microsystems and Oracle are now one and the same.

An era has come to an end, and one of the fundamental software technologies that fueled the Web 2.0 evolution has slipped even deeper from its open source roots into corporate American hands.

Oracle has officially announced that it has completed the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which earlier had purchased MySQL.

While the benefits and disadvantages of this acquisition remain to be seen, and best assessed by hindsight sometime in the future, one thing remains sure: this will most likely have a significant impact on the prototypical Web 2.0 web designer. Web 2.0 was fueled by Open Source technologies and the LAMP Stack in particular.

Without Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP there would not be a Web 2.0 as we know it now. It might be similar, it might be wholly different – but it could quite probably have been something with a price tag attached to it.

The Web 2.0 ecosystem of blogs, galleries, forums, discussions boards and all sorts of PHP/MySQL driven applications reached their ubiquity through availability. These technologies became web standards because they were free – in terms of cost and in availability of source code – and were easily obtainable and also did their job extremely well.

Such projects include (for example) WordPress, phpBB and other software built on the LAMP software stack. MySQL is also used in many high-profile, large-scale World Wide Web products including Wikipedia, Google, Drupal and Facebook.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysql

As many budding entrepreneurs know, starting off in the web design business is anything but easy and cash flow is an issue. The open source availability of MySQL as a reliable database back-end enabled many web sites to be born as dynamic web sites and not static HTML pages. This furthered the separation of style and content, promoted the use of CSS for styling and enabled the use of RSS feeds for the broader dissemination of information. Without MySQL, Web 2.0 would not exist.

And so, web designers have looked at the two recent acquisitions of MySQL as ominous. Monty Widenius, the inventor of MySQL, has made it very clear that he is concerned with the future of MySQL and has even started an online petition to help save his database and its role in the web ecosystem.

In April 2009, Oracle announced that it had agreed to acquire Sun. Since Sun had acquired MySQL the previous year, this would mean that Oracle, the market leader for closed source databases, would get to own MySQL, the most popular open source database.

If Oracle acquired MySQL on that basis, it would have as much control over MySQL as money can possibly buy over an open source project. In fact, for most open source projects (such as Linux or Apache) there isn’t any comparable way for a competitor to buy even one tenth as much influence. But MySQL’s success has always depended on the company behind it that develops, sells and promotes it. That company (initially MySQL AB, then Sun) has always owned the important intellectual property rights (IPRs), most notably the trademark, copyright and (so far only for defensive purposes) patents. It has used the IPRs to produce income and has reinvested a large part of those revenues in development, getting not only bigger but also better with time.

If those IPRs fall into the hands of MySQL’s primary competitor, then MySQL immediately ceases to be an alternative to Oracle’s own high-priced products. So far, customers had the choice to use MySQL in new projects instead of Oracle’s products. Some large companies even migrated (switched) from Oracle to MySQL for existing software solutions. And every one could credibly threaten Oracle’s salespeople with using MySQL unless a major discount was granted. If Oracle owns MySQL, it will only laugh when customers try this. Getting rid of this problem is easily worth one billion dollars a year to Oracle, if not more.

http://helpmysql.org/en/theissue/customerspaythebill

And so, the sale to Oracle is complete. Web 2.0 is already a mature technology and emerging standards such as HTML 5 and CSS 3 are being actively discussed online on a daily basis. For now, MySQL remains an integral part of the web design experience. As designers, we hope that this essential tool will remain part of our toolkit. But, evolution in web technologies is a constant and new open source database projects such as MariaDB, Hadoop and others are popping up on the horizon. And there is even a No-SQL movement gaining steam out there.

Oracle may choose to kill MySQL in order to promote its own database solutions. It may decide to keep MySQL as is. But web designers and open source advocates everywhere may already be heading away from the MySQL status quo and forging the technological basis for the Web 3.0 paradigm.

In the long term, the acquisition of MySQL may be of little or no real consequence. MySQL laid the foundations and defined the standard, but the world continues to turn and innovation in technology never stops.

As Kundera said, Life is Elsewhere.

Could open source abandon the Google train?

By Eric on January 30, 2010

There is one thing that is certain in the computer world. No one loves a bully.

Microsoft has its many enemies. Now that Google has become the behemoth it is, there are many people who look to it with skepticism and uncertainty.

American capitalism, even when infused with the do-no-evil values of Google, are suspect to the world of Open Source.

In this case, the issue is patents.

There have been rumblings that Mozilla would look to Google alternatives for the default search engine within Firefox.

If Mozilla needs a nudge, Canonical just gave it one, defaulting to Yahoo search for future versions of its popular Ubuntu Linux operating system.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10443576-16.html

The Achilles heel of the computer revolution

By Eric on January 30, 2010

Office Girl magazine, UK 1951

The invention of the computer was propelled by one simple ambition: to make a machine do the work instead of the worker. To do it faster, with less errors, with no fatigue, without worry. Automatically.

People used to say: ‘Just imagine… you could press a button and all of this [insert your choice of laborious office chore here] could be done instantly!”. Dreams of a full day’s work actually being accomplidshed in a few hours in the morning fueled the dreams of a technological future. Visions of greater leisure time, less stress and a healthier lifestyle were common threads among the pictures painted about the world beyond the year 2000.

The socio-economics that have accompanied the realization of this computer revolution are far different than the ones that were anticipated. Work week hours have not gone down. Productivity has increased, but so have costs and inflation. Actual income value has gone down. People are less healthy now than their parents were. They sit at the computer working with their minds more and work with their bodies less. The current generation of kids and teens will be the first in Western history to have a lesser life expectancy than their parents. For too many kids, playing Wii is the most exercise they get.

We have forgotten that the computer was supposed to be a means of liberation. A tool to a better, easier, future.

Instead, we have used it to boost our productivity over the same work week length. Generating more product and more revenue but not making anyone’s life any less laborious.

Somewhere along the way, we have forgotten the primary objective and used the tool to satisfy our greed.

heliomedia weblog

~ Rants and raves from the design world of Eric Girouard ~