OSBC Town Hall Meeting

Rachel Chalmers, a fellow analyst at The 451 Group, did an excellent job at moderating this evening's OSBC Town Hall Meeting (and I'm not just saying this because I have the pleasure of working with her now - she is a class act.)

Some of my favorite quotes from the meeting...

Regarding the possibility that Oracle has purchased both Innobase and Sleepycat as a move against MySQL, Marten Mickos said: "It's like killing a dolphin by drinking the ocean."

Tim O'Reilly on open source licensing: "I've always believed that the GPL will wither away."

Much of the discussion was focused around the future of computing services, with both Tim O'Reilly and Nick Carr agreeing that at some point in the future (possibly as soon as 10-20 years) there will essentially be one computer (at which point Rachel posed the question whether we will call it HAL or Sir) and that those that control the data, will be in control of the services.

Tim O'Reilly recommended that instead of spending money on acquiring open source startups, Oracle should be buying databases of information.

Interesting stuff!