The folks at EnterpriseDB, which offers PostgreSQL support and thus benefits from Oracle's purchase of mySQL, is out with a self-serving survey that fails to ask the questions its prospects need answered.
Oracle vs. Open Source is an important battle, and Oracle's purchase of Sun is an important milestone in that battle.
Oracle has shown contempt for the open source model from the beginning, but it was able to buy the movement's crown jewels — OpenOffice, Java and mySQL — through its purchase of Sun.
Since then Oracle has been making this software semi-proprietary. It kicked out the non-Oracle committers to OpenOffice, who are now begging for development alms at LibreOffice. It showed contempt for Apache with Java, such that Apache left the Java Community Process and its Project Harmony, at which point Oracle simply made a deal with IBM. It has made clear that the key mySQL features henceforth will be Oracle-proprietary, and everyone knows the price is going up.
Oracle is happy to develop these open source projects alone and charge accordingly. They might as well be proprietary. To all intents and purposes they are.
All this challenges the business model of any company which, like EnterpriseDB, exerts a claim on code and sells support. Since it's a company, Oracle could buy it, too. Why, then, should someone go to the expense and angst of switching to PostgreSQL, knowing that if EnterpriseDB succeeds it's vulnerable to an Oracle takeover?
What Oracle has done with Sun is blow a huge hole in the corporate open source business model. EnterpriseDB didn't ask about this in its survey. Scared?
The name of the file at the top of this post speaks volumes. The survey was conducted at JavaOne last September. Given the Sun purchase, JavaOne was an Oracle show. Could EnterpriseDB have asked the hard questions at an Oracle conference?
No, it concluded. The result is it censored itself.
What Oracle was telling open source through the purchase of Sun is that open source will never scale, never be an enterprise threat, because the model doesn't result in companies big enough to threaten proprietary companies, which can merely purchase any outfit that threatens their revenues.
EnterpriseDB calls itself "the enterprise PostgreSQL company." But how can a scaled enterprise truly trust an enterprise that could easily fall into the maw of Larry Ellison like so many other companies, including the biggest open source projects?
Apache's answer is to have software produced by a consortia of businesses, through individuals who agree to keep their own copyrights and follow a process. It's the only answer that makes sense to me at this time.
The answer given by EntepriseDB does not give me the comfort I need, as an enterprise customer, to make a commitment, because EnterpriseDB's business model gives me no assurance that my efforts in supporting the code won't become part of Oracle someday. (Image from the blog Deceptology. Yes, it's Jabba the Hutt, from the Star Wars movies.)
If you're going to pay for a poll, ask the questions people need answered.
