When Apple stops releasing things on that website for iOS and Xcode (and yes: they do still have some things that are at least LGPL in those distributions, and no: it is not sufficient to give me very-similar-but-slightly-different code from OS X) only when I get around to making a public statement (which I absolutely hate doing) over things they don't send me when I request them via email, maybe they will have some right to getting the praise you are deciding to lavish. (Speaking of which, I have given them months to respond to my most recent requests for a bunch of things; I have gotten so used to Apple giving open source the finger, and thereby have backup plans involving disassembles for most of the things I care about at this point, I had forgotten to even follow up on them failing to release anything :/.) (As for Oracle, I think Apple is much more harmful, as at least Oracle is upfront about where you stand, so the greater community knows to handle them with care and avoid putting them in the center of something they will later come to regret.)
Oracle is one of the major contributor to open source, see the lineup here, chances are you're using some of them: https://oss.oracle.com/ starts with Java
Effectively all of Oracle's "open source" things come from Sun Microsystems, upon which Oracle happily latched onto and sucked dry.
Oracle has what's called the "sidaM Touch". It's like the Midas Touch, but instead of gold, everything Oracle touches turns to shit:
Java -> shit (though maybe slightly less so now).
Solaris -> shit. OpenSolaris -> shit, now dead (thank the Lord for illumos).
OpenOffice -> shit.
GridEngine -> shit. Lustre -> almost became shit and died; would have if it weren't for the Oracle-side devs jumping ship.
NetBeans -> in the process of becoming shit.
MySQL -> shit (though it pretty much already was; somehow, though, Oracle managed to make that worse and prompt the existence of MariaDB); I realize this wasn't Sun's, but it's still an open-source project that Oracle assaulted, robbed, and left to die on the cold streets by the dock where Larry Ellison's (admittedly pretty badass) sailboat is docked.
OpenDS -> dead (though it was mercifully forked into OpenDJ).
Project Wonderland -> now limping around as "Open Wonderland" after Oracle forcibly amputated its leg.
By some miracle, the only things that haven't completely turned to shit or died (or both) yet are Virtualbox and SPARC (though OpenSPARC is effectively dead since Oracle didn't continue it).
Yes. I'm honestly baffled that anyone thinks that Oracle has a admirable history of contributions to open source. When a software company is so large (and especially when they buy a company like Sun) one can always cherry pick examples in oracles favor, but on the whole, I see oracle trying to exploit open source software, and they don't seem to play nice with others.
I can't even find a single example from Oracle that would be cherry-pickable as evidence for their supposed open-source-friendliness. Literally every open-source project that Oracle owns has stagnated at best (aside from maybe Java; while I'm personally unimpressed by Java 8, I know there are a few people who would disagree with me), and at worse has significantly deteriorated, died entirely, been shoved off onto some other organization, or resulted in a fork, and sometimes all of the above has happened (see also: OpenOffice).
Like, I'm a pretty well-natured person in general and am happy to give even some of the most despicable companies the benefit of the doubt on occasion, but I seriously can't find a single reason to do so for Oracle. They're just that fucking irredeemable.
JVM (not Java) gained invokedynamic, which is an amazing work. invokedynamic work was paid for by Oracle, so at least I am thankful to Oracle for advancing the open source there.
MySQL wasn't acquired by Sun; that was a direct acquisition by Oracle in order to snuff out the most significant player in the realm of open-source SQL databases (and thus snuff out one of the most significant competitors to Oracle's flagship, Oracle DB).
As a result, MySQL is effectively dead outside of legacy deployments that haven't migrated to PostgreSQL, MariaDB, or one of the NoSQL monstrosities like MongoDB.
Even InnoDB was eventually forked; MariaDB and Percona both use XtraDB nowadays, probably because they didn't feel like being tied to something that - like every other open-source project Oracle has owned - would be fated to eventually wither and die.
What do you mean MySQL was not aquired by Sun? I was among ~400 MySQL employees in Orlando when the deal was announced. Yes, Sun was later bought by Oracle.
Huh. I always thought that Oracle acquired MySQL directly, but it turns out I was wrong (Sun did so in 2008). I guess you learn something new every day.
Maybe I was thinking of InnoDB or BerkeleyDB or somesuch and just conflated them all together...
Use to be a System Librarian and had to run Oracle DB.
Issues:
1. OpenOffice gave it to Apache Foundation and not LibreOffice
2. MySQL is abandoned by many major users but we have MariaDB
3. Java suite against Google to make API Copyright-able
4. Oracle's White Paper stating that Open Source cost more and is less reliable.
5. Oracle Linux (Just a rip off of Red Hat)
6. KSplice bought by Oracle none of us gets to use re-bootless kernel patches with that technology since it has no development after it was bought 3 years ago. EDIT (FALSER: Was going off the top of my head) It is available to people who purchase support convert to Oracle Linux and they are making updates to legacy customers (Which is good to know)) corrected bellow.
I could go on about Oracle :)
So yes a bias against Oracle's Open Source stances and activities.
Just to clarify, legacy Ksplice customers are still supported under their original contracts, Ksplice is available to new customers with Oracle Premier Support, and finally, Ksplice updates are still being provided for free for all current Ubuntu and Fedora distros.
MySQL, which - as one of the worst victims of Oracle's sidaM Touch - ended up being forked into MariaDB, and is now effectively irrelevant outside of legacy deployments since anyone who knows what they're doing has switched to PostgreSQL and anyone who doesn't know what they're doing has switched to MongoDB.
MySQL as packaged by Oracle is quite literally a corpse. MariaDB is a reanimated corpse.
And such is the tale of an open-source product acquired by a multi-billion-dollar company who made those multiple billions of dollars entirely on selling a commercial product against which the open-source product competed. Competition-elimination-by-acquisition at its finest.
That would be the "reanimated" part of "reanimated corpse"; I think you've significantly misinterpreted my point there. MariaDB is not dead; it's undead. A zombie. Or perhaps resurrected and now serving as a database messiah. Whatever the case, it's the end-result of something that's dead (MySQL) no longer being dead.
That is a different topic altogether. I'm referring to Open JDK.
Ever heard of the fasted embedded database engine called Berkeley DB. Doesn't matter came from where, Sun or what ever is still being developed and contributed in the open source environment.
Oracle Corporation makes versions 2.0 and higher of Berkeley DB available under a dual license.[15] The sleepycat license license is a 2-clause BSD license with an additional copyleft clause similar to the GNU GPL version 2's Section 3, requiring source code of an application using Berkeley DB to be made available for a nominal fee.
As of Berkeley DB release 6.0, the Oracle Corporation has relicensed Berkeley DB under the GNU AGPL v3.[16]
As of July 2011, Oracle's list price for non-copyleft Berkeley DB licenses varies between 900 and 13,800 USD per processor.
That's the AGPL, mind you. One of the most ridiculous and restrictive "open-source" licenses created; it's not really intended to be applied to libraries, and is incompatible with every other license in existence, including even the standard GPL. Applying it to a library makes the open-source version effectively unusable.
I disagree, it matters because acquiring a technology that has an existing open-source community (that can fork your codebase...) is not the same things as releasing your internally developed technology as open-source and build a community around.
Looking at OpenOffice or MySQL, it does not seem that Oracle had a great success with open-source communities.
And the Java topic is not different altogether, it is disturbing to claim to be "open-source friendly" when you release an open-source implementation for the JVM but sue on the basis that the API is copyrighted.
What is off-topic it talking about Oracle at all in this thread ;-)
Sun would have sued Google if they had the money for the lawyers[0].
Initially I was partnering with Google, but now I side with Oracle's decision, as it is now proven how Google just pulled a Microsoft and fragmented the Java eco-system.
Now we are stuck with partial Java 7 assuming 4.4 devices, good luck using try-with resources in lower versions and no plan for future versions as of the Android Developers Fireside at Google IO 2014.
The Android team seems more interested in porting the whole Eclipse/Ant infrastructure, building more Google APIs or making Android run everywhere instead of improving the language support.
> Initially I was partnering with Google, but now I side with Oracle's decision, as it is now proven how Google just pulled a Microsoft and fragmented the Java eco-system.
I'm not sure that's a good enough reason so say that it's "ok" to claim that an API is copyrightable. The idea that I might have to ask someone permission just to make API-compatible alternate implementation seems ridiculous.
If you have bothered to read what Gosling had to say about it:
"Google totally slimed Sun. We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan: he just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun."
Publishing lots of code under an OS license does NOT make one a valued contributor to the open source world, especially when you have a history of anti-OS litigation.
It doesn't take anti-Oracle bias to reflect upon OpenSolaris and other direct assaults on open source undertaken by the company. Defend them all you want, you're still on the wrong side.
i can never forget the freetype hinting death trap... that thing persisted for too long, and was unreasonable to start with. i think i can forgive now that i have seen this. :)
EDIT: i take it back, i got the wrong end of the stick, it looks like they have open sourced important things, but actually its a list of nothing.
At least the first four in the OS X 10.10 tree are apple original software, not just source dumps of other people's OSS products. Ok, that's terrible statistics since the files are alphabetized and Apple comes early. But take a look through there at the copyright owners and you'll see lots of original software released as open source.
To me, this is like calling someone who occasionally eats a vegan diet a "Fairly decent Vegan". No, if you eat meat or cheese on a regular basis you're a terrible Vegan!
Just because Apple releases the source code as read-only doesn't really make them fairly decent with open source.
To me, if you're not willing to pull commits from outside your walled garden or allow external forks of your technologies, then you're terrible at open source. Sure, you technically checked off the very first checkbox ("make source available") but you stopped there. That's not a success, that's a stillborn effort...
Heck, when I look at the wikipedia entry for Open Source, the first line is: "In production and development, open source as a development model promotes a universal access via a free license to a product's design or blueprint, and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint, including subsequent improvements to it by anyone." Which I don't think Apple is really engaging with any of the OSS spirit on any level.
I mean is that what open source is now? As long as the source code is technically viewable, it's "open source software" now?
> To me, if you're not willing to pull commits from outside your walled garden or allow external forks of your technologies, then you're terrible at open source. Sure, you technically checked off the very first checkbox ("make source available") but you stopped there. That's not a success, that's a stillborn effort...
That's still significantly better than what a lot of big "open-source" companies do.
Not that I disagree with you. Just putting things into perspective.
Love that Apple is going open-source, and hopefully they do this for more of their code (pssssttt...Swift)