OStatic

Andy Updegrove may have cracked the code on Oracle's seemingly insane decision to start charging $90 for the formerly free ODF plugin for Microsoft Office. That's $90 in a minimum pack of 100, plus a 22% support fees for updates. Does Oracle really think that this will fly with companies, is Oracle trying to kill off the product entirely?

The ODF plugin was developed to allow Microsoft Office users to exchange documents with OpenOffice.org users. It works for spreadsheets, presentations, and word processing docs and Sun gave it away for years. So why has Oracle so suddenly decided to charge for it? Whatever Oracle's strategy, the company isn't talking. At first glance, it seems crazy, but Andy Updegrove has a theory that seems likely:

Former Sun chief open source officer Simon Phipps is joining the Open Source Initiative (OSI) board effective April 1st. Let's hope Phipps can shake the organization up a bit.

I'd hazard a guess that many newcomers to the open source community are partially or even wholly unaware of the OSI and what it's meant to do, because the OSI has not been a terribly dynamic organization over the past few years. The OSI is considered the steward of the Open Source Definition (OSD), and is the body that approves new open source licenses. But its influence has been considerably on the wane for some time now.

It seems like there's been little but bad news and resignations coming from Oracle since it finally managed to close the deal on Sun. Finally, there's good news in that Drizzle seems to have a bright future ahead. It just isn't with Oracle.

Turns out, there's plenty of interest in the fledgling database project. Specifically Rackspace is investing heavily in Drizzle for its Rackspace Cloud. Jay Pipes, Monty Taylor, Eric Day, Lee Bieber, and Stewart Smith have all landed over at the hosting company to work on Drizzle. According to Pipes, Rackspace sees Drizzle as the answer to problems that MySQL can't solve:

If you look back on the history of OpenOffice.org, it makes the 3.2 release that came out on Thursday the 11th even more impressive. Nearly 10 years in the making, OpenOffice.org has evolved from a clunky proprietary offering that struggled to import Microsoft Office documents to a productivity powerhouse that is faster, supports a fully open document format (ODF) and handles most proprietary formats with grace.

Originally StarOffice, Sun purchased StarDivision in 1999 and released the first code for OpenOffice.org in July of 2000. The open source office suite has improved by leaps and bounds since its inception and is now good enough to satisfy millions of users around the world who prefer a free (in all senses of the word) office suite to paying hundreds of dollars for a proprietary suite.

What would you say if you heard that OpenOffice.org had an impressive 22% share of the market? It does, in Poland and the Czech Republic. At least according to numbers pulled together by Webmaster.de using FlashCounter. The analysis looked at visitors from more than 20 countries and found use of OpenOffice.org is highest in Europe and not even in double digits in the United States.

The results may not be entirely accurate, but at least they provide a picture of office suite usage. The method used was to examine fonts installed on systems to identify various office suites. The OpenOffice.org numbers roll up all variants of OpenOffice.org ? IBM Lotus Symphony, StarOffice, NeoOffice, etc.

Hats off to the Project Wonderland developers. Despite Oracle laying them off, the team will continue work on Project Wonderland. According to the project blog the core group behind the 3D virtual world toolkit believes in the open source project enough to keep working on it without backing from Oracle.

Despite the layoffs, Nicole Yankelovich, who was the project team lead before being cut by Oracle, says that the project has great momentum. Nicole Yankelovich, who was project lead before being cut by Oracle, says that the team is pursuing for-profit and not-for-profit options, and things look good:

If you follow open source news at all, it's been pretty hard to ignore MySQL the last few months. With a desperate campaign to stop Oracle gobbling up MySQL, the FLOSS poster database has been front and center. As usual, the PostgreSQL community has been quietly coding away and working on the 8.5 release scheduled for the first quarter of 2010.

However, one of Monty Widenius' arguments about the vulnerability of PostgreSQL has caught the attention of the PostgreSQL community. In a comment on OStatic, Widenius says that PostgreSQL can also be killed by a company like Oracle:

Let it never be said that Monty Widenius gave up without a fight. Widenius hasn't given up hope of blocking Oracle taking MySQL as part of its Sun acquisition. He started before the holidays by calling for a letter writing campaign, and has stepped it up with an Internet petition and a personal email campaign to recruit signatures. Here's hoping it will fail.

It probably wouldn't be fair to call it spamming, but he's gotten pretty aggressive by emailing (in his own words) every person that I have ever communicated with regarding MySQL. You might not agree with Widenius, but at least you have to credit him with tenacity.

Oracle's lingering takeover of Sun Microsystems stands to do a lot for Sun, but at the moment, the lifeboat is just out of reach. As a result of its continuing losses, Sun is dramatically slimming down ? several thousand of the company's employees won't be returning after the New Year's break.

Cutting employees, of course, means cutting the things they work on, and that could spell trouble for some of Sun's less profitable ventures.

Michael Monty Widenius wrote a nicely-worded response in the comments to my previous post Oracle, Mysql and the GPL: don't take Monty's word for it , and I thought it deserves more visibility, so I'm quoting it below. For the record, I am in agreement with Steven O'Grady of Redmonk, who wrote that Monty just wants to get the band back together and that dual-licensing isn't the only way to make money from MySQL. What I objected to was what I felt was a conflict of interest that hadn't been seriously reported. That, and I dislike how this brouhaha has resulted in unfair attacks on the GPL.

?Click the read story button to see Monty's comments.