Open Source in action

Sun was recently purchased by Oracle. With the acquisition, they got MySQL and it's large open source community. The amount of fragmentation and reforming in the community is really interesting. The article linked to below is a great example of open source in action, where the community will survive while the original project/product may fade away.

One of the best parts of the article:
"Open source customers are a notoriously fickle bunch. If one project doesn't deliver what users need, the users go elsewhere -- and the same goes for developers. Forks are a fact of life in the open source community, and arguably an entirely healthy one. Oracle just better hope it doesn't end up on the wrong side of the fork."

This captures the essence of the open source community and I hope Oracle has a flash of insight. I think it would be great if Oracle is able to recover, but from the looks of it, this started when MySQL was purchased by Sun. I'm just glad I prefer PostgreSQL and the PGSQL community seems to growing.

Article:
MySQL Forked beyond repair

So you take the current MySQL situation and compare it to the Nokia TrollTech acquisition. Nokia stepped in and Qt could have taken the same path, but Nokia LGPL's the framework, awesome.