"Oracle only cares about making money and, to be quite honest, is just not very good at it."
Funny, because Oracle makes MASSIVE amounts of money. Look at all of the acquisitions they do. The cash is coming from somewhere. Oracle is great at making money. The problem is, the way Oracle makes their money is fairly disgusting and exploitive of their customer base.
"The problem Oracle faced was that their precious database had lost favor in the IT world over the open source rival MySQL."
This is not true in the slightest, unfortunately. Too many mission critical applications run on Oracle to say that it lost to MySQL. What *did* happen over the last 10 years, is that Oracle is no longer the only game in town, and that the small potato applications and customers moved to MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. But if you are a bank, insurance company, airline, government, etc., MySQL is *no substitute* for Oracle (although PostgreSQL *is* and I would appreciate it if you'd get off your MySQL soapbox and get on the PostgreSQL soapbox) at a technical level. Period. It pains me to say it, but if you need ultra performance and reliability, Oracle is your go-to option. So Oracle's differentiator is speed and reliability, and that's why they can charge thousands per CPU core (or socket, I forget their exact licensing) while MySQL is free. Or to put it another way... MySQL and Oracle are not competing for the same customers, and as soon as MySQL got traction, Oracle knew they couldn't compete without slashing their margins and just walked away from small apps.
"... I immediately downloaded the beta and began using it in all of my production work."
Beta's shouldn't be used in "production work".
"One thing I would really like to see is Java being removed from OpenOffice."
If you look at the OO site, its usage of Java is fairly minimal, and in sections that generally won't impact performance. Everyone loves to blame OO's speed issues on Java, but the reality is, it's just poorly written code. Java is plenty fast (10% speed gap *at most*), the issue is the code. Personally, I'm not a fan of working with Java, but at the same time, I can be honest about the facts around it.
J.Ja
