Hubris like this triggers unstoppable nerd rage in me. I can't even imagine how big of a jerk one would have to be to seriously believe they can appropriate the work & passion of hundreds of thousands of developers from all over the world who are giving the fruits of their labors and imagination to the world. Ellison flat out doesn't understand software and thus he deserves to get completely steam-rolled by the open-source community, just like we did to Balmer a decade ago with Linux. Oracle could not be killed fast enough for my liking. For far too many decades Ellison has fucked up the software industry, like a parasite siphoning money off of everybody. Now you may think that's an inflammatory remark and that Oracle really does provide "real" value to their customers. (I've had to use Oracle for real work, and there is not a single thing I like about it.)

Bollocks!

Invert the question: for every dollar of "profit" diverted to Ellison, imagine the lost opportunity cost to the rest of us—what else could those billions of dollars have been spent on other than a shitty, obscenely overpriced database that belongs back in 1983 and that is entrenched into the biggest Gordian-knot of enterprise vendor-lock-in? A helluva a lot more good could have been done in the world if Ellison was a pauper. He might have even been a good man before he had all that money, though I doubt it.

My only question is: how best can the open-source community align itself to cut off Oracle's air supply?

Now that Google is unabashedly marching under the evil flag of Mordor, can't they just open up Big Table or something for enterprise customers, and snatch the pebble from Ellison's hand? Since day one, Google's dominant strategy has always been to take an expensive, over-engineered technology that other megacorps sell, scale it off the charts of those selling it, and then give it away, recouping the difference by becoming the quasi-impartial steward of the Internet.

I don't think NoSQL yet has the traction to put two bullets in the back of Oracle's skull and call it suicide, though as we saw with the success(and then failure) of MySQL, the situation can change in as little as a few years.