In a recent
announcement by Oracle, they're increasing their clout (aka support) for Open Source Software by acquiring an open source db company: Innobase. For everyone's info, Innobase are the creators and maintainers of InnoDB, one of the engines behind MySQL. As mentioned in the announcement:
InnoDB is not a standalone database product: it is distributed as a part of the MySQL database. InnoDB's contractual relationship with MySQL comes up for renewal next year. Oracle fully expects to negotiate an extension of that relationship.
Which means, Oracle wants MySQL to use InnoDB? Is Oracle trying to use MS tactics? Embrace, Extend and Extinguish. My feeding more into MySQL as InnoDB's owner, and at certain point, introduce a choke point, then that's it. MySQL is dead. We are now left with what? PosgreSQL as the next biggest-brother of F/OSS RDBMS. What cookin' at Oracle Larry?
As Oracle acquired several key domain vendors in the past, the acquisition of InnoDB just give me the cold blank stare on what could happen next. The company I am working for currently is facing a sleeping-with-the-enemy scenario where two of its competitors now well within Oracle. So as I have and still advocating in our company, be free, use free software.. and stay away from a lock-in.
NetBeans 5.0 is out! It has many goodies that developers normally found in a more preferrable Eclipse. What I am excited to try out are Matisse and its many out-of-the-box integration with SJAS, Tomcat, and even JBoss. Oh wait, the Java editor is vastly improved. If NB5.0 provides the same intuitive refactoring as Eclipse does, then I'd probably switch side. If and only if NB itself is not bloated. Or, if bloated, at least if it performs better then I might as well take it. OK, after this post, I'll be downloading the beta @ netbeans.org.
