Website engine in new hands

I'm a fan of Burton Malkiel's analysis of equities markets; I invest mainly in indexes. Consequently, it's not all that often that commercial A&M actions threaten something of value to me. But this is different.

Oracle's proposed purchase of Sun affects the future of a key asset in which I have a huge consumer surplus. You, too, probably. Just last year, Sun bought the open-source database MySQL on which this site—like millions of others—is based. It's a vital piece of the web: not irreplaceable, but still…

Here's the problem. Sun was a long-term, serial supporter of "open-sourced" software (maybe that was Sun's undoing?). But Oracle makes a competing, more powerful, commercial database server. It will now also own Sun's other open-source ventures such as OpenOffice.org, and Virtual Box virtualization software…not to mention the jewel in Sun's dowry: Java.

Tags for this entry: database software