I am tidying up my flat and recovered a copy of my 1988 paper developed for Oracle Expo Europe of that year, called Developments in the UK Case Market. It looked at SSADM vs Information Engineering and how and why to implement these methodologies. It’s not as dated in content as one might think, although the language is a bit old fashioned. Obviously if using post relational design and implementation techniques some of it is a bit old hat but not having a data model will be a cause of regret. …
Sunset, finally?

Simon Phipps comments on Oracle’s decision to close down the SPARC and Solaris business units. He was close to the politics of Sun’s “Dash to Open” in the mid noughties. My feeling is that Sun had failed before Schwartz was appointed; there was no longer room for differentiated hardware company; Oracle’s failure to monetise the SPARC product line may have been caused by management hubris, but the long term economics …
Free Software in Europe please
It’s an exciting day with respect to the Oracle/Sun acquisition and the EU investigation. Eblen Mogden, on his blog represents his evidence, which says better than I can, why forcing Oracle to de-merge or re-licence MySQL is against the public interest. …
Oracle, Sun, MySQL and Monopoly
Monty Widenius has issued a manifesto asking that open sourcers and MySQL users to write to the EU to let them know their views on Oracle’s potential ownership of the MySQL copyright. He of course hopes we will argue that they shouldn’t. …
Oracle & Sun & the European Single Market
A lot of people have been busy commenting on the EU’s investigation into the competitive dynamics of Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun, so I thought I’d join in. …
What’s Larry up to?
Larry Ellison, interviewed by Ed Zander about Sun, Oracle, the future and the Americas cup. This took place at a Churchill Club event on 21st September. Forbes have written it up, as Larry Ellison’s Game Plan, and the event is available on YouTube, of course, Zander + Ellison on the Technology industry. Thanks to Volker for pointing me at the Video. …
Are liberal licenses a better future proofing
A couple of days after the Kable Open Source conference, I looked up Gianugo Rabellino’s blog and read his then most recent blog article, “Of Oracle, Sun and Open Development” about the impact of M&A on open source investment protection.
The conclusion I draw from his article is that open source adopters need to make investment protection a selection criteria. Its well understood that the vibrancy of the product community is crucial, so its just obvious that taking a view on the future is as important. Gianugo also argues that liberal licenses enhance the ability of a community to survive M&A activity. I think he’s probably right, and this means that license terms might become important even to end user sites who have no intention of distributing software. It may also be worth measuring how diverse an open source development community is before adopting the software. …
Barcelona
I travelled to Barcelona with Mrs L. and on my return went up to London and travelled by Tube to deliver a presentation to Kable’s “Open Source in the Public Sector”, which reminded me of the weekend in Barcelona, both the prices and experience were better in Spain, although I didn’t travel on the Metro during a rush hour. As I landed, the day before, I received a message that Oracle had bid for Sun Microsystems, I also reflect on the helpful people at Heathrow. This post includes a slide show of my Barcelona pictures. …
Look at what Google won’t put in a press release
Last month, just before travelling to the West Coast, I practised my latest presentation,”Six reasons to choose Solaris”, in which I have a slide with some company logos of the users of Solaris 10. One of my audience asked why Google wasn’t on the slide …