A salesperson walks into your office today and tells you that you have to buy a new, pre-built, expensive desk for every one of your employees. You have to buy a new desk today and replace it every three to five years. You see, you don't really own the desk; you're simply purchasing a license to use the desk.

Oracle, maker of one of the largest proprietary database solutions, recently purchased Sun, who makes MySQL, a piece of open-source database software. Naturally, this sounds like trouble. One of the biggest database companies buys another of the largest?

Given how rich Apple's recent earnings were--buoyant in the face of the recession--it's perhaps an inopportune time to suggest that Apple needs to figure out its enterprise application strategy.

Three years ago, Tom Foremski wrote an interesting piece called “Adapt or die--the choice facing the open source movement“, which began:

Can Larry Ellison be stopped? By which I mean could Oracle shut down the fledgling open-source software movement through a series of acquisitions??

From a list of 16 items asked of 2,000 software decision makers for 2009, the use of open-source software has risen to the top.

During a conference call yesterday after his $7.4 billion acquisition deal was announced, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said one of the primary reasons Oracle is interested in Sun is because of its Solaris operating system, a widely distributed version of Unix that has a large installed base and has long been the dependable platform for Oracle's popular database.

Industry analysts weigh in on what the future holds for Sun Microsystems’ software initiatives. Potential anti-trust issues and fee-based Java extensions may lie in the future