A while back I wrote rather optimistically that I expected Oracle to play nice with the open source community
“I don’t see why Oracle won’t be able to keep MySQL open and still have a nice profitable business model.”
However, all that seems rather less likely, now that Oracle is suing Google over patent infringement in the open source Android platform.
Here is a great point of view from a Java developer on this lawsuit. Not only it explains what the suit is all about, but also gives historical perspective, how Java got into this mess in the first place.
From that link:
“Android actually *was* a great platform that supported existing Java developers and libraries incredibly well (without actually being a Java environment), and for the first time there was a serious contender to “standard” Java that Sun had absolutely no control over.”
and:
“If for nothing else, Jonathan Schwartz will be remembered as the man who broke open the Sun piñata, simultaneously releasing more open-source software than any company in history and killing Sun in the process. Either Jonathan had no “step 2″ or the inertia of a company built on closed-source products was too great to overcome. In either case, by spring of 2009 Sun was hemorrhaging”
It’s long but well worth a read if you are concerned about the future of Java.