Oracle will 'kill MySQL' and steal its users? Ha ha, haha, ha. Seriously, we won't – Oracle exec

Except openSolaris and ZFS, openoffice, hudson, glassfish, innodb, and mysql looks a little pale.

Now TC, who would spend all that money to buy a company's products, just to kill them off?

Who said they were buying the open source products, Bob?

The only open source products Oracle has ever killed are the ones they can't figure out how to make money from. :)

Well they must have bought Sun for something, I just never could figure out what.

AFAICT, they bought Sun for Java. They didn't trust anyone else with control of the language. Anything else was gravy.

@jdixon - Indeed, JAVA was what it was all about.

Oh, come on, like Sun Microsystems never killed a project? Zembly? Open Tape?

> ... like Sun Microsystems never killed a project?

Sure. Wasn't it Sun who purchased that Canadian Linux appliance manufacturer and shut them down?

Added: Cobalt Networks seems to be the company I was faintly remembering.

But Sun couldn't a candle to Oracle in that regard.

My instant reaction of "What's so important about Java" just shows I'm not a programmer.

Just hand it to the same people who control C.

Yup, Sun killed Cobalt. That was a puzzler, because the Cobalt was popular and made money. Young grasshoppers, remember things like this the next time you are tempted to believe that people who run big businesses are smart.

SUN was founded by engineers. They were smart... just not that kind of smart. Their demise was a given from the beginning.

> That was a puzzler, because the Cobalt was popular and made money. Y

Yeah, Cobalt was a very good company. Their folks did some good work for Sun after they were bought, supposedly (Wikipedia has an article on them). For some reason, I was thinking they were based in Canada, but it says California. No idea where I got that from.

Quoting: My instant reaction of "What's so important about Java" just shows I'm not a programmer.

Just hand it to the same people who control C.

Java's easier than C, which is why the Android people based Davlik on it... Cast a wide net and all,... in terms of getting developer mind share. If Java was in the hands of the people who control C, we'd have two versions of C (and I'd guess some would say that's a good thing). Of course, I'm not counting C+, C#, etc. as versions of C, for the purpose of making that statement. I thought most OSS people thought more options are better?!?! No?!?!

I meant that as a metaphor, not a literal. :^)

My original line said, "Just hand it to the people who control Fortran", but then I realized that would be terrible.