How good an open source citizen can Oracle become?

This is not to disparage their entry to the board of Eclipse. Nor their donation of TopLink code. Not to mention all their other contributions to open source projects, and contributions by employees, which have indeed been both welcome and sizable.

But at the end of the day Oracle is a proprietary software company. It makes its money licensing code for money, and controlling that code.

This is not a situation like that of Sun Microsystems, which saw its software revenues dwindling and decided it could best monetize those assets by joining the open source movement. Oracle has a dominant position in the corporate database world, which it wishes to extend and profit from. Its work to embrace open source is merely an attempt to extend its reach.

At the heart of the open source movement, as opposed to the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) movement, is that moves like those Oracle is making should be welcomed and encouraged.

But it doesn't mean we close our eyes to the underlying reality, anymore than we should ignore the real business imperatives of Microsoft, IBM, or any other vendor. Control of the customer is and will remain the name of their game.

Put it this way. My daughter loves tigers. She wants to work with big cats. She thinks they're cute. But she also knows they're dangerous. She's going to be careful. I trust her to be careful.

You be careful too.