Larry Ellison Prostitutes Java?

I just saw a tweet from a character called Zed Shaw. Zed is a colorful guy, and a man of determined opinions. If he thinks something is wrong he will say so, most likely dropping f-bombs freely in the process.

His first tweet was rapidly followed by another.

Thinking about it, I cannot remember installing any other language and have it dick around with the settings on some other application.

I thought possibly Zed had caught the toolbar from somewhere else (I came within an inch of simply throwing WinAmp away when it intruded on my browser's search facilities in a similar way), but sure enough there's a (sadly undated) article at java.com entitled How do I unistall the Yahoo! toolbar from Firefox?, a clear enough indication to me that Java is likely responsible for Zed's woes.The FAQ explains about not just the Yahoo! toolbar but also the Bing and Google toolbars, but it appears that only the first two are installed by Java.

I suppose I could be wrong, but it seems to me that this behavior is new since the Sun empire was assimilated into the hive-mind by the Oracle collective. The fact that you can deselect the install options is neither here nor there. The real question is, what's the strategy behind this change? I can hardly believe that any revenues this hare-brained scheme might bring in are of the slightest significance to the world's second largest software company. But why would the company that effectively owns Java (in so far as anyone can own a language) deliberately try to discredit it in this way?

We can only speculate. Let's make it interesting ...

Death by Oracle

This is probably not an original idea. I am not one of those who complain about Oracle's acquisition, as a part of Sun Microsystems, of the MySQL mark and the associated software. Larry Ellison is plenty shrewd enough to make money out of open source - OK, maybe not as much as from proprietary, but when you are Larry Ellison you might figure you are getting close to enough anyway. Or maybe not.

But suppose someone evil in the Ellison empire were to decide to bury MySQL for ever, it strikes me that all they would have to do would be to bundle it under the Oracle installer. This gargantuan framework with basic Java look-and-feel and often totally inadequate error handling (disclaimer: I have little recent experience of Oracle, but I have used their products since 1986 or thereabouts and would be surprised if things had changed radically) would be quite enough to deter anyone who hadn't already forked over huge amounts of money for the software behind it. A free software release would simply not be worth the pain.

Sun to Become Part of Oracle

I'm not a great one for handing out stock tips, but when I said a month ago that Sun Microsystems was worth buying at $8 it looked like I was wrong when the IBM acquisition talks fell through. Just the same I held on, and now it looks like I'll be able to take a $1.50 profit when Oracle buy the company in the summer. Of course buying after the talks failed made even more sense, as Alex Martelli wisely pointed out in a comment. Thanks, Alex!