SOLDIERX.COM Nobody Can Stop Information Insemination

Today, we saw a rather interesting development in the Oracle lawsuit against Google. Oracle was accusing Google of infringing on Java patents. It looked like Oracle was going to score an easy victory. Today however, a post was put up, showing a post made by Sun Microsystems former CEO in 2007 stating that they welcome the use of Java on Android phones just put a huge monkey-wrench in what was going to be a straight victory. This is also yet another showing of how Oracle's practices have become very abusive with regard to developers and their products.

One example of this was seen with their decision to discontinue OpenSolaris. Many developers of OpenSolaris were disgrunted with this, and decided to make a new fork of OpenSolaris called OpenIndiana. The lack of communication between OpenSolaris developers and Oracle is the more telling story though as Oracle did not communicate with many of them at all. This would also cause many OpenOffice developers to create the LibreOffice fork and the issues cause by that would eventually cause the discontinuation of OpenOffice due to what can be percieved as Oracle's mismanagement.

The most telling matter though is that currently, there was also an outstanding case against Oracle from the Department of Justice on grounds of false claims that was settled at the start of the year. I won't go into detail as it is rather long and drawn out, but I will say that given the settlement, it is my opinion that Oracle most likely played dirty to get federal agencies to buy their products. (More information on this is available at http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2011/January/11-civ-128.html) This makes me question if as a company, Oracle can be trusted.

If Oracle wants to get their act together they need to make a few changes. They need to stop alienating customers and developers. Furthermore, they need to approach the products and communities that Sun Microsystems was a part of much more carefully. They are quickly becoming more difficult to work with than Microsoft and Apple, which I find legitimately frightening and should be a sign that they need to fix themselves.