"As SCO once demonstrated so aptly..."

I believe you are confusing a lawsuit concieved by wingings rather than written in that font. :)

What was the problem with unloading Symphony on consulting support based upon LibreOffice? Given that this is a business they want to be rid of, I would expect they would not need to bolt proprietary stuff on to it any longer.

Regarding MariaDB support, I think you're correct that they're treating it as a competitor. This wasn't really the case for MySQL. IBM provided a supported version of MySQL.

IBM is most visible around Apache OpenOffice. What they are doing around MySQL v. MariaDB is tacit support through inaction. They didn't turn to supporting MariaDB or another MySQL version when Oracle de-supported MySQL on IBM platforms. They did something similar during Oracle v. Google - they chose just that time to abandon the Harmony project and commit to Oracle's JDK.

Your memory of IBM differs from my own.

I can't say I've had that much to do with them. HP, on the other hand, I could rant about for a while...

If they own the copyright, they are free to relicense a piece of data

Sorry to be pedantic, but replace "a piece of data" with "a work of authorship". If there isn't the creative work of a human being involved, it's not copyrightable. And then we get to this:

17 CFR 102(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

And that means that even when the hand of man is involved, a lot of things are still not copyrightable.

Let's look at what Oracle is doing. I'll start the list of moves that appear to be intended to alienate the community around the very software they're promoting and cause the Open Source community to create viable forks that end up absconding with the product and its market. You guys contribute additional examples...

• Oracle v. Google regarding Java and the premise that APIs are copyrightable.
• Apache OpenOffice v. LibreOffice (which has a full-time negative publicity generator in Rob Weir).
• MySQL v. MariaDB.

IBM isn't known for dumb moves, but partnering with Oracle on this sure is one.

Bruce

If it stops functioning, it's lifetime is over. Duh. :)

Rather than an encryption gateway, having your email client handle encryption avoids the problem of man-in-the-middle attacks between the gateway and the client.

I don't have much reason to encrypt, but Thunderbird has my certificate installed and does my digital signing. This is not unusual for a modern email client.