10
Oracle, savior of FOSS
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
10 points (100.0% liked)
linuxmemes
21025 readers
1045 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
- LemmyMemes: Memes
- LemmyShitpost: Anything and everything goes.
- RISA: Star Trek memes and shitposts
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
- These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudoin Windows. - No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Some context for you:
Oracle has humorously called out RedHat for a recent broken promise to the open source community.
But, Oracle is best known in the Open Source community for their purchase of Sun Microsystems resulting in Sun's massively successful open source database MySQL going from the #1 database in use in the world to not even cracking the top ten.
Many factors contributed, but most notable was a sudden drop in servers available to serve the documentation and help pages for MySQL.
Oracle (coincidentally?) makes a great deal of money from their closed source Oracle Database. An inferior (in my opinion) direct competitor to MySQL.
It's entirely possible that Oracle did not buy Sun Microsystems with the sole intent to kill off the most popular open source database of all time.
For those who agree that Oracle might be totally innocent in that, I agree it's possible - and I have a bridge I would like to sell.
There is no comparison between the two. They don't even compete in the same market. Oracle is an enterprise level database with features MySQL doesn't even dream of yet, whether it is security, performance or just reliability alone. The problem with it is that the company is horrible and extorts people who actually have an use case which requires them to use oracle. They've built the infrastructure in such a way that one can't just buy a database and use it by themselves, they need to buy services form the company forever. And there isn't really a fixed price for those services. Oracle basically charges as much as it thinks the client can afford.
Sun bought MySQL in 2008. Oracle bought Sun in 2009, but not for MySQL, they just kinda got it as a package deal. The real target was java. There wasn't any plan to keep developing it and MySQL wasn't making enough money on its own to be able to fund it's own growth. There wasn't some plot from Oracle to kill off MySQL, they simply didn't bother with it.
And by the way, there is a non Oracle MySQL alternative called MariaDB.
I've migrated workloads off of Oracle onto MySQL. They are absolutely competing products.
We can both name 11 things Oracle can do that MySQL cannot, but it doesn't change the fact that many organizations chose between those two databases plenty of times before Oracle acquired Sun.
MariaDB was invested in at additional cost to the open source community after Oracle bought Sun. It's existence doesn't absolve Oracle of the path their ownership put MySQL on.