While Oracle has gained control of Sun technologies, the software giant has also lost some of the people key to their development. Could this hurt them down the road?

First it was Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, then Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps and then the ‘Father of Java’ James Gosling – and now, Bryan Cantrill, one of the authors of Sun’s DTrace technology, has left Oracle to “to venture again into something new.”

In Cantrill’s latest blog entry – which any mention of Oracle is noticeably absent from – he details his 14-year career with Sun, highlighting his involvement in Fishworks, and the Sun Storage 7000 series.  In the July 25 post, titled “Good-bye, Sun,” he also expresses his gratitude to many of his Sun co-workers and what they taught him.

“One of Sun’s greatest strengths was that we technologists were never discouraged from interacting directly and candidly with our customers and users, and many of our most important innovations came from these relationships,” he wrote.

Is Cantrill implying that these relationships are something Oracle lacks? That’s what one article on H-online suggests, saying it may be an indication of the culture at Oracle, since “Oracle has developed a reputation for being very hard to communicate with.”

Still, this doesn’t seem to be anything that Oracle or Larry Ellison plan on changing soon.  Since the Sun acquisition, lack of communication has become evident as customers are left wondering about Oracle’s future; for example, wary users are still without a clear roadmap for Solaris and OpenSolaris.

Even when Oracle does provide information — such as details about its stack computing strategy – customers have said that they’re not saying enough.  The OpenSolaris governing board has also threatened to dissolve, citing a lack of communication between the Oracle and the OpenSolaris community.

Paul Cormier (photo courtesy of Red Hat)

In today’s installment of Obvious News, a Red Hat exec recently said he didn’t consider Oracle to be an open source company. Really? That’s funny, because I don’t think Oracle thinks of itself that way either.

I mean sure, Oracle has its open source elements which have been made that much more robust with the Sun Microsystems acquisition. But if you were to ask 100 IT people to describe Oracle, I doubt any of them would say that it’s an open source vendor.

“I wouldn’t even consider calling them an open source company at all,” Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat, recently said. “When you’re making a choice as a company on what’s open and what’s closed then your customers suffer.”

According to Cormier, a company isn’t an open source company unless everything it creates is open. So according to him, even Sun Microsystems wasn’t open. Cormier said the development around OpenSolaris, for example, wasn’t a true community development. Rather, it was done mainly by developers within Sun.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has not minced words when it comes to his plans for the Sun Microsystems acquisition. It is his goal to make money and those parts of Sun that are not profitable will likely fall by the wayside. Simon Phipps, Sun’s chief open source officer, left following the acquisition — or more accurately, he was never offered a job at Oracle. That’s not to say that open source and profitability are mutually exclusive, but then again, Oracle as a company is about 20 times bigger than Red Hat.

Cormier continued:

“There are pieces that are open,” he said about Oracle. “But what we do, is open everything. We don’t say ‘here’s this part of the operating system that’s open, but this other part is closed.’”

Up until now, most of the opinions we’ve heard about the possible fate of MySQL in the hands of Oracle have been limited to Oracle and the European Commission (EC).  Well, at least until Dec. 10 when Oracle competitors are expected to offer their views of Oracle taking charge of the world’s leading open source database.

But exactly how would Oracle taking control of the open source database affect open source software users themselves?

The 451 Group, an independent technology-industry analyst company, recently tried to gain insight into this question by surveying a group of 1,000+ members of the “Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) open source user community,” asking them about their MySQL usage and opinions on the Oracle-Sun acquisition.

According to the results of that survey, MySQL usage is expected to drop if Oracle gains control of the open source database. The report said that while 82.1% of the respondents use MySQL today, that number will decline to 78.7% in 2011 and 72.3 % in 2014. This is further borne out as 15% of open source users and 14.4% MySQL users said they would be less likely to use the product if indeed Oracle acquires it, according to the report.

But can the survey results be used as an accurate forecaster of what would happen should Oracle come into possession of MySQL?

This part seems a bit tricky. For example, the survey is only focusing on a 347-person sample when current open source users number in the millions. A much broader sampling could very likely bring a very different result.  And isn’t Oracle’s argument centered on the idea that since it does not directly compete with MySQL, it has no motive to make changes to the open source database?

Still, this survey shows that not everyone has faith in Oracle’s stated MySQL motives.  Only 4.3% of respondents thought that Oracle should sell it to another vendor, but 32.6% thought that Oracle should set up an independent foundation for MySQL. And with recent rumored reports of a compromise by Oracle in which it will set up a separate MySQL business unit, that just might be the direction in which the software giant is heading.

Are you an open source software user? Does it matter to you who owns the open source software you use?  Are you apprehensive about Oracle gaining ownership of MySQL? Let us know what you think.

What is the future of MySQL now that it’s in the hands of Oracle?

This question about the highly popular open source database is being debated in the Oracle and Sun communities — some are insistent that Oracle won’t kill MySQL, but other open source executives are split. Some point out that this is Oracle’s chance to innovate and prove it’s serious about open source; however, the software giant has not shown a commitment in the past to open source even as it’s grown in popularity, according to the ZDNet article.

Collaborate ’09 presenter and Oracle and MySQL DBA George Trujillo addressed the question Monday at the conference in his session, “What Every Oracle Professional Needs to Know about MySQL.” Trujillo said he could not say exactly what was going to happen with Oracle and Sun, but he did know one thing:

“I will tell you MySQL is not going to die,” he said.

Trujillo said because of the simple fact that MySQL is an open source database — a free source code available to anyone — it will continue on no matter what Oracle decides to do with it.

So, maybe MySQL is not as much in the hands of Oracle as we are think it is.

“It’s open source — if we wanted to get together tonight to get the source code and create our own version to start selling tomorrow, we could do that,” Trujillo told session attendees.  He said what’s more important is that whoever is the leader of open source has to be innovative.

Trujillo also discussed common misconceptions users have about MySQL, one being that the database can be compared with Oracle. He said comparing MySQL to Oracle is like comparing a fast speedboat to an aircraft carrier — if you bought one, it was probably for a reason, and you won’t be happy switching to the other.

So, maybe the real question is not will Oracle keep MySQL, but what will the software giant choose to do with it? How innovative will they be? Is there anything you would like to see Oracle do with the open source database? How do you think, or would like to see, Oracle will market itself to the open source community?

My guess is they will pursue that opportunity. Not necessarily out of any sense of contributing to the greater good by encouraging the spread of free software to IT shops strapped for cash in recessionary times, for instance. It would have more to do with the fact that there is money, good money, to be made by committing more deeply to open source technologies.

This should not surprise anyone. After all, this is the company that jacked up its licensing fees some 15 to 20 percent last year, right around the time the recession was crushing the economy.

I really don’t have any problems with vendors large or small, making as much money as they can from open source. If Oracle can intelligently and fairly find a way to charge Oracle and Sun users for open source products and associated technical services, it could lay down a business model that the rest of the open source world could follow. With greater revenue streams generated, more jobs can be created among both vendor and IT companies, which would result in more useful products delivered and greater productivity.

Lord knows many Linux distributors and other open source software developers have had their chance over the past decade to establish growing and profitable businesses. But with the exception of Red Hat and possibly Novell, none have succeeded at sustaining a largely open source business capable of generating hundreds of millions in revenues. Sun is the other possible exception here. A recent Goldman Sachs report estimated that the company’s Java-based revenues could approach $300 million in the current fiscal year ending in June, but even that tidy sum was enough to allow the company to continue under its own steam.

But Oracle, with revenues of $25 billion and significant market share in multiple enterprise software markets, is in a strong enough position to show the industry how real money can be made in open source world.

The biggest change Oracle has to make to achieve this goal doesn’t depend largely on clever ways of blending of open source and its proprietary products, although it will have to do some of that vis-à-vis positioning and pricing strategies, but on taking a more enlightened approach to attracting new customers. Yes, I’ll say it, we need to see a kinder, gentler Oracle coming into this market.

There is a way to achieve a balance that allows the company to continue to compete aggressively without trying to win the Albert Schweitzer Award for Humanitarianism .

And why not be kinder? The company can’t charge major companies such as IBM or SAP any more for licensing Java. Those licensing fees are protected under long term contracts and can’t be touched until they come up for renewal. The same goes for Sun’s corporate users, particularly those locked into multi-year support and maintenance deals.

Instead of tossing aside good products from Sun such as the MySQL and Glassfish, Oracle could put development monies into enhancing them and making them even more useful to customers. In doing so they could also serve as effective weapons against Microsoft in the lower end of the market. More than a few open source users have told me they would be willing to pay for products such as MySQL and Glassfish if they can continue to deliver good ROI and be properly maintained for a reasonable fee.

There is no need for Oracle to be overly protective (read greedy) of its higher end proprietary databases and applications. That business is solid and under no immediate competitive threats, even from IBM.

I’ll give Oracle the benefit of doubt here; it is still early in a process that will take a year or two to fully play out. The company may find the right balance between its software-as-a-contact sport approach and being a more enlightened leader that could bring the open source and proprietary worlds together in a way that profits everyone.