Re: Oracle buying Sleepycat, JBoss, and

Centuries ago, Nostradamus foresaw when scrappy@postgresql.org ("Marc G. Fournier") would write:
> On Sat, 11 Feb 2006, Bruce Momjian wrote:
>
>> This highlights one of our vulnerabilities.  Oracle bought InnoDB to
>> attack MySQL, and we don't think we have a similar vulnerability.
>>
>> But there is so little money made in open source that small amounts
>> of money (by Oracle standards) can easily gain control over
>> companies that have embedded themselves in open source projects.
>> Basically, to the extent these purchases can be used to harm MySQL,
>> they can be used to harm us too.
>
> How?  What external projects (or companies) do we rely on for our code
> base?  As far as I know, we've been very careful about this, with the
> biggest one that ever gets mentioned time and again being the whole
> readline stuff ...

PostgreSQL may not itself directly rely on external projects.

But people *using* it have external dependancies.

- Perl users usually depend on DBI; an "attack" on DBI could make
  PostgreSQL "less usable" for them.

- PHP users depend on the drivers integrated into the PHP "stack;"
  if Oracle gains control over organizations deeply involved in
  determining what is in that stack, that can be bad news for
  "all databases other than Oracle."

The PHP situation is the characteristic one to watch, as that is the
one which Oracle is influencing...
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