Oracle wins the 2010 Open Source Enemies Prize

“The year 2010 has seen a number of enemies of open source
software making waves. After thinking about it long and hard
— about five minutes or so — I have determined the
proper winner of the 2010 Open Source Enemies Prize, though some
other contenders deserve a Dishonorable Mention. Winner: Oracle
Corporation

“Larry Ellison, one of Oracle Corporation’s three founders,
helms the software vendor as its CEO. On 27 January 2010, Oracle
announced its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, at that time the
corporate steward of a number of prominent software projects that
had — to one degree or another — been distributed under
the auspices of open source licensing. Among these are:

“* Java: Sun Microsystems has been the copyright holder for the
core Java software ecosystem since its creation. Over time, the
Java Development Kit and its prerequisites have been increasingly
released under open source licenses, though even in the last days
before Oracle acquired Sun one had to agree to a decidedly non-open
end user license agreement to install the Java platform.”

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