I have to agree with others about Open Office. The best thing Oracle can do is to hire the people that are key to Open Office, set them up in their own separate Office space and keep them far away from the rest of the Oracle Development staff. Oracle’s client facing application stack is in one word; HORRIBLE. In two words, HORRIBLE AND ABYSMAL!

The only good client or development tool I have ever used, which Oracle provides that I can say kind words about is JDeveloper (which they originally bought from Borland). Alas, as Porky Pig says, duhdiduhdiduhdi, that’s all folks!

How good are the default Oracle Financial tools? Would you go to a dentist who still uses pliars to pull your teeth? Or who uses ether to put you to sleep?

How good is sqlplus? Better than some, but for a database solution as expensive as Oracle, I have seen much better tools from the Open Source world.

Face it, Oracle doesn’t know very much about making good client or development tools, outside of JDeveloper. I would hate to see what butchering they could do with Open Office. My recipe is for Oracle to hire and remove from the campus. They may do this, since Larry HATES MS!! Anything that can be a thorn in MS’ side, Larry likes!

I think Oracle will take Solaris and tweak it to be the preferred platform for Oracle. Solaris has been one of Oracle’s favs for years. Only recently have they embraced Linux, since it offered a low cost point of entry. Solaris now wearing their brand with exceptional Enterprise tools, file systems, and monitors, makes it a good OS to expand for the Oracle and Peoplesoft horizons.

Glassfish may die, and that is really a shame. It is a very good App Server and for the cost hard to beat. We still have JBoss, but Glassfish is much easier to use and administer.

MySQL? It could turn into an Oracle lite, but I doubt it. Good thing is is forked now, since I think Oracle will stick a fork into it. It’s done. There is still the forked version and of course Postgres and Firebird. BTW, Firebird is often overlooked and it is a shame. It is a really good Open Source Database with long and thick roots. Think back to Aston-Tate for you old timers!

Well these are my predictions for what they are worth. As far as JRuby, Jython, Groovy? No way Oracle kills these off. They will want EVERYTHING running on the Oracle JVM. I would not be surprised if these teams are not only kept on board but new ones hired. Not only is this extremely advantageous for Oracle from a business perspective, but remember what we said about Mr. Ellison’s love for MS? Do you really think he wants MS NET to have anything over his new baby that has been crucial and key to his now mature children (Oracle/Peoplesoft)? I don’t think so!

Obviously, they will ignore Java as platform and focus more on “enterprisey” Java to capture big fat market shares. J2ME, JINI, JXTA, etc2 developers will be left rot in hell by eli and sons. I doubt they will continue their support on Java and other sun noble offering(ex, opensolaris). I can imagine eli and son said,.”you java, jsf developer can f**k off ok,.. we will never care about you loosers”.

eli and son will be a dictator on JCP, put pressure on Java openness and developer communities as whole. Eli and son have never been a supporter of open sourcing Java and J2EE, any supporter of this movements can only be dreamed.

He will also says “Hey we don’t need you developers, We already have our own developers dogs at our HQs,.. so why not you find another jobs,.. working part time at mall would be suit for ya”

Yeah,.. maybe they will continue to release JDK free,.. but full with uncorrected bugs and it will even persist until end of his company or world.

sigh.. I have been Java developer for a decade, now I think it’s time for me to leave Java totally. As developer I never trust eli and son.. and I unwilling to bow to those greedy corporations.

Its time for me to switch to python and ruby.

Other than that, I totally agree. Oracle needs the Java community to be healthy to continue with its Enterprise goals. Doing anything to significantly hamper that community would be like shooting itself in the foot.