In an official Oracle FAQ document about the acquisition of Sun, it lists its future plans for some products after acquiring Sun, including MySQL, GlassFish, NetBeans, etc. It is true that this plan does not have many contractual constraints, but it still shows how much Oracle supports these products.
In last week's InfoQ report "Stallman writes to the EU asking Oracle to abandon MySQL", free software spokesperson Stallman said that "if Oracle is allowed to acquire MySQL, it will definitely limit the performance and performance development of the MySQL software platform, so it will limit the performance of the MySQL software platform." MySQL software brings huge harm to everyone." Oracle said it would support MySQL even more than Sun to reassure users:
Oracle plans to invest more money than Sun in developing MySQL. After the acquisition, Oracle hopes to continue to develop and provide the open source MySQL database. Oracle plans to add MySQL to its old database product line, which currently includes the open source database Berkeley DB. In addition, Oracle currently provides the open source transaction storage engine InnoDB, which is also the most important and widely used transaction engine in MySQL. Oracle has now released MySQL as part of our enterprise Linux.
Considering that GlassFish is a good reference implementation for Java EE, Oracle also decided to continue to maintain GlassFish as expected:
Oracle plans to continue to maintain GlassFish Enterprise Server as an open source reference for Java EE standards and actively support the GlassFish community. In addition, Oracle plans to invest more in adapting and renovating common underlying components of Oracle WebLogic Server and GlassFish Enterprise Server to better serve users of both.
Oracle's declaration on NetBeans is more interesting. You will find that there is no so-called "investing more money than Sun" in the description of NetBeans like MySQL. In addition, since Oracle already has JDeveloper and Eclipse-based development packages in the past, where NetBeans will go has always been of concern to Java developers. In the past, Adam Bien, a professional consultant, lecturer, and software architect, listed 8 reasons why Oracle should continue to support NetBeans in his blog, such as NetBeans' small size, high adoption rate, support for Java FX, and excellent visual design and tables. wait. In the documentation, Oracle talks about:
Similarly, we hope that NetBeans can become another open source option like the two free enterprise-level Java development tools currently provided by Oracle (Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse). For Oracle JDeveloper, it is still the official tool for developing Oracle Fusion middleware products and next-generation enterprise applications, but if developers want to develop pure Java and Java EE systems, they can choose their own free Tools: JDeveloper, Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, maybe NetBeans.
It is worth mentioning that although this plan may contain some beautiful visions, at the end of the document, Oracle also mentioned that this is just a rough direction for their products, just to provide more information and without any contractual restrictions. Nor can it be used as the basis for procurement decisions. Not to mention, these “visions” may also come to nothing in the future.
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