NewsOracle's Costly Open Source Missteps

Oracle’s Costly Open Source Missteps

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Oracle might not care, but so far its handling of its open source assets has cost the company money and programmers.

The Register’s Gavin Clarke outlined two instances where Oracle is losing money by owning a competing open source product, and it’s losing programmers by scaring off an entire open source project.

When Oracle purchased Sun about a year ago, the company also purchased Glassfish. Glassfish is a direct competitor of IBM’s WebSphere, Red Hat’s JBoss and Oracle’s own WebLogic application servers.

As a result, lots of customers are picking Glassfish. And if they chose to purchase the Glassfish Enterprise Server, it’s half the cost of Oracle’s WebSphere.

And in terms of losing programmers, Oracle watched as the entire Hudson community walked away. Hudson has been forked, virtually all of the programmers have left, and now work on the new project called Jenkins.

“Now, Oracle has a growing reason to dislike the projects themselves and it’s got everything to do with the two things Oracle values most: money and control,” Clarke said.

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