Whilst the sceptics reel and the blogosphere goes mad with speculation over whether Oracle will use Sun's large open source portfolio to Microsoft's/et al. detriment the key players in the commercial side to open source are putting a positive spin on this news, especially none other than Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth.
It's hard to dislike Mark Shuttleworth. He's cool, calm and collected and without him, there wouldn't have been Ubuntu. However, is Mark up to a bit of damage-limitation positive spin here or is he saying what he truly believes? Read for yourselves! The bold Mr Shuttleworth was queried yesterday about his thoughts over the Sun/Oracle deal at a press conference over the imminent release of Ubuntu 9.04 and this is what he had to say:
"What is interesting to me about this move is that it really cements the idea that free software and open source are the profound driving forces behind software today. It's very hard to name a large proprietary software company which has been created since the 90's."
He went on to point out that the major sources in software today are either free software or powered by free software such as Google or Yahoo etc.
"The fact that Oracle has just announced a multi-billion dollar acquisition of a company that describes itself as the world's biggest Free Software and Open Source company to me is enormously instructive. To me it cements the idea that open source and free software are the big game in town and everyone else is trying to figure out what that means and how they integrate it. What they can't do is ignore it."
Steadfast as ever, it's arguable that Shuttleworth certainly talks a good talk. As we said in our previous article earlier in the week over Sun's buy-out, time will be the ultimate teller for Ubuntu, or indeed Linux's fortunes. Whenever that time comes, we'll all be waiting, but for now Oracle are keeping fairly tight lipped about any plans for the future.
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