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Is Oracle the world’s largest Open Source Company?

by | Friday, 05th Mar 2010 | 6 Comments | Share

No matter how much we hate to admit this, Oracle might just be the largest open Source Company in the world. It is true. Oracle has some of the biggest brands in the Open-Source world under its name now.

This happened with the acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The Open Source projects hosted under the banner of Sun have all come under direct handling of Oracle and include some of the most popular technologies of today like Java, MySQL, OpenOffice.org, Glassfish, Virtualbox etc.

Some of the Open Source technologies, currently being developed under Oracle are,

  • MySQL: The Open Source database powering almost every website out there.
  • OpenOffice.org: The best alternative to paid Office suites, available for free and full file format compatibility.
  • VirtualBox: The free virtualization solution from (earlier)Sun Microsystems, now managed by Oracle.
  • OpenSolaris: The Unix based OS with the best features of Solaris and compatibility with the Sparc architecture.
  • Java: The enterprise development solution, a robust and developer friendly software development platform.
  • Glassfish: The Open Source application server providing SaaS features, compatible with Java.
  • Eclipse: Oracle plays as a board member and strategic developer with Eclipse, a development tool.
  • Oracle VM: A server virtualization platform.

This list is far too small than this one, but it gives a gist of what Oracle is doing, and it looks good. It is time we start liking Oracle for what it is, and stop complaining about what it will never be.

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Chinmoy Kanjilal is a FOSS enthusiast and evangelist. He is passionate about Android. Security exploits turn him on and he loves to tinker with computer networks. He rants occasionally at Techarraz.com. You can connect with him on Twitter @ckandroid.

Chinmoy Kanjilal has written

The author of this post can be contacted at chinmoy@techie-buzz.com

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  1. ComputerJy on March 5th, 2010 at 3:45 am #

    You must be kidding me, These are all Sun Microsystems owned projects. Oracle got those by simply acquiring Sun.

    Except for Java so far Oracle hasn't done anything yet for open source

  2. Debjit on March 5th, 2010 at 6:21 pm #

    Looks like we have to start accepting Oracle the way it is :-) by the way Apache Software Foundation also has lot of open-source projects under it's umbrella.

  3. Ron Sheek on March 6th, 2010 at 11:48 am #

    These are all Sun Microsystems owned projects.

  4. Andy on May 19th, 2010 at 2:26 pm #

    Yes we could say that they now own these applications but from the time when they acquired, how many of these said open source applications have been updated?

    Sad to say that I have been waiting for ages for the new build for OpenSolaris but still no luck!

    Hopefully Oracle can still continue supporting the open source community just like SUN has supported them.

  5. Server Virtualization on November 30th, 2010 at 5:58 pm #

    Oracle has a huge say in the open source community.