I remember when Linux was trying to get validation in the enterprise space and Oracle porting their DB wares to Linux accomplished this almost single-handedly over night. (This was circa '99, 2000, don't remember exactly.) I want to stress that the geeks had already known that Linux was ready on the server-side by this time but now we had a nice talking to convince the suits, "Oracle takes Linux seriously". I have always thought that Oracle has not been antagonistic to Linux because Oracle is not an OS shop whereas, for instance, Microsoft _is_ so Oracle's core business has not been in danger. IBM made sure to differentiate AIX away from Linux and definitely grokked Linux before Oracle. SUN never could give up on Solaris and now we have Oracle Solaris so we'll have to see how that fares.

I wouldn't say that Oracle has been open source unfriendly, witness as somebody else has said BTRFS. It would be sanguine to say that Oracle like other large corps behaves hot and cold towards free and open source software depending on who in the company is doing the talking.

Also as others have pointed out, Oracle seems to have had (up until this point at least) an admirable stance on software patents as far as I can tell, issuing public statements on patent reform.

However Google (rightly or wrongly) is seen as very open source friendly. This is doubtless due to Chris Di Bona and their summer of code thing and noticeably employing a lot of people to work on Linux and open source stuff. Android is way freer than Apple's IOS and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 and RIM's offerings. (Nokia has opened Symbian and Meego is open but they are not considered relevant at the moment.) So Oracle suing Google over Android is going to be seen as open source unfriendly regardless of the legality of the patent lawsuit. Surely, all this could be cleared up without recourse to lawsuits?

I think taking sides in this is silly. The law (however crappy) is the law. Yes, software patents need reform but until then it'd be nice if we could get on with the business of coding without worrying about litigation. The article's author, this Daniel guy, is obviously an Apple partisan and (thus?) a Google hater and seems to have a very bizarre recollection of computing history.