O’Reilly: Oracle & Open Source: Gazing at the Crystal Ball

This is basically a feature-length promo for a new O’Reilly
title, but author Andy Duncan makes some rather bold predictions,
including a whopper: that MySQL will grow so popular that Oracle
will be forced to open source its product in the future.
Personally, we’re skeptical. He writes:

“What makes me so sure? Well, I’ve worked as a consultant within
Oracle as a DBA, within Sun as a Java developer, and I also teach
Perl courses for Learning Tree. I don’t have the global view of a
corporate executive, but I do have a keen worm’s-eye perspective
from the software-development trenches, and down here in the mud,
the shift is clear and evident: The number of Perl courses I’ve
been asked to teach has been rapidly increasing, and the number
attending each class has also been increasing. ‘Why are you here?’
I ask my students. A typical response is, ‘So our company can move
away from Windows and get into Apache, Linux, and Perl. That way,
our accountant can cut a million off the software budget.'”

Complete
Story