“If I read the runes correctly, the hopes of many of the
committed followers and proponents of Open Source have been
disappointed by its progress in recent times. Admittedly, the
attempt by SCO to stop Linux in its tracks (or get a royalty from
its use) looks to have failed and last year saw Microsoft almost
accommodating Open Source in a deal with Novell (but not without
spreading a little FUD).“However, it also saw Oracle train its big guns on Red Hat,
threatening to spoil its whole business model simply by competing
directly–and this was not long after Oracle had embarrassed MySQL
by buying up the Open Source providers of two of the database’s key
complementary components…”