The Sun has Set

In case you’ve been in a box the past few days, Oracle has bought out Sun Microsystems.  While it may not seem like a big deal to some of you, you may not realize just how much Sun has contributed to the open source community, and that does not just apply to Linux users.

If you ask a poor college student (I’m just assuming most college students are poor, because when I went to college I was poor, and most of my friends were as well) and they are honest about where they get their software from, they are using Open Office to type up their term paper, rather than downloading a pirated version of Microsoft Office (then again, I’m assuming college students are honest).

I know that the average person does not have boatloads of money to spend on software, and that’s where Open Office gets its appeal. It’s free to download, and it doesn’t matter what platform you’re using it on: it just works, and it’s standards compliant.

If you have a website, and you’re not using ASP.NET (or any .net platform), you’re most likely using MySQL – that is if you’re not stuck in Web 1.0 and using HTML only.  MySQL is a simple, easy-to-use solution for storing data dynamically (memory-resident, rather than flat file).  It’s free, and has a great user base.

If you’ve ever wanted to try out a new OS without having to burn a CD, reboot your computer or *gasp* repartition your hard drive, you’ve most likely used a virtualization program.  VirtualBox is one of the most user (and novice)-friendly virtualization applications out there.  I know, because I’ve been using it since I found out other distributions of Linux besides my own offer live CDs to try out.  It makes giving a new distro a test drive simple.

Why have I been praising these 3 seemingly unrelated programs?  Because they have all been offered to us free over the years, and they are all currently owned by Sun Microsystems.  Now that Sun has been bought out, it doesn’t seem like these programs will be offered free to the masses any more.  I can almost guarantee that MySQL will be going the way of the Dodo. MySQL is going to be nothing more than a redundancy in a corporation that is built around a bloatware has-been of a SQL solution.

Farewell Sun, it was great while you were the big guy.  We will miss you.

~LG and JonsJava