Oracle Needs a Clue As Brain Drain Accelerates 388
The Contrarian writes "It looks like Oracle is not suiting former Sun staff well, nor community members in the Java and OpenOffice.org communities. This weekend saw an unusually large number of rather public departures, with (among many others listed in the article) the VP running Solaris development quitting, the token academic on the JCP walking out and top community leaders at OpenOffice.org nailing their resignations to the door after having the ex-Sun people slam it in their face. The best analysis comes from an unexpected place, with the marketing director of Eclipse — usually loyal defenders of their top-dollar-paying members — turning on Oracle and telling them to get a clue."
Re:So obvious question... (Score:4, Informative)
Read this weekend perspective on the whole Apple dropping Java thing [subfurther.com].
On the other hand, despite all the difficulties, with Oracle's vast resources at its disposal, it would be ridiculous if they couldn't do a new OSX port. Maybe Steve Jobs wants the opportunity to call Oracle "lazy" too
Re:I hope Oracle doesn't get a clue (Score:3, Informative)
I hope they pay the price for their ignorance and hubris. What did they get for buying Sun, exactly?
They got hardware which is what they've wanted for a long time. Sun has a wide range of great hardware and a very solid OS. The evolution of Oracle DB requires intimate control of the system at the hardware level. The database server will be able to directly control resource allocation.
I don't think they were interested in the rest of the company. It's probably just in the way.
It appears they are focusing on their area of expertise.
Re:Sun did not make money on this stuff (Score:3, Informative)
For small rackmount storage, that's not exactly burning up the marketplace.
Without scorching the market place, the figures seems to indicate a successful project in financial terms (in opposition to what the OP said: "They didn't make money").
Re:No mention of Apple? (Score:3, Informative)
[citation needed]
http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/08/08/07/132229.shtml [slashdot.org]
That was 2 years ago.
Re:So obvious question... (Score:4, Informative)
Did you read TFA? It is no just about developers and communities, it's about analysts as well. If Forrester and Redmonk are issuing research notes saying drop Java then management wont be singing Oracles tune for long either.
Re:Does anybody still use Java? (Score:3, Informative)
Hmm... have you actually looked for jobs recently? You may be surprised that besides JavaScript (which is a different non-overlapping area entirely) there are probably more jobs available for Java than all the others you've listed combined. Perl is miniscule, PHP has quite a large following, but I wouldn't want to write anything large for it. Ruby is a niche (fad?) that seems to have stabilized, and most VB development has been absorbed by C# after MS killed it in the 6->.net cross over.
Re:Abusiveness is just a hobby. (Score:3, Informative)
Oracle is know for their excellent database and for crap everything else. This has been so for the last 15 years - all their tools, from the time of Oracle Forms till today are unstable, bug-filled POSes.
Anything Oracle aquires just withers and dies - just recently Oracle bought BEA, makers of BEA Weblogic a top Java J2EE Application Server, and proceeded to kill the golden eggs goose by steeply increasing fees (now charged Oracle style, per-CPU-core), resulting in all large companies rushing to get rid of or replace Weblogic (I myself saved 1/2 million dollars per year to the company I was working for).
Oracle is simply inept at anything but databases.
Re:So obvious question... (Score:3, Informative)
But Sun couldn't be bothered to made a Mac version?
They could, but Apple wanted to have control of it. You have to remember that things like the Apple Store and now the iTunes Store and Mobile Me use WebObjects. This was NeXT's framework for creating web applications, written in Objective-C until 4.x and then rewritten in Java in 5.x (which made it much less good, which is why there are successful open source clones of WebObjects 4.5, but no one outside Apple is using Java WebObjects). This means that a lot of core Apple infrastructure depends on Java, and they didn't want this to depend on a third party.
They were also pushing Java-Cocoa as an alternative to Objective-C on OS X, so they wanted the Java-ObjC bridge to be very closely integrated into the runtime. No one used it, so they stopped caring about it about five years ago.
Re:So obvious question... (Score:3, Informative)
Really? Because where I am they're having trouble hiring people with the skill set we require.
That's a pretty broad comment. What are the skills that you require? If we're talking about people with experience writing object-oriented COBOL code and willing to work for little more than minimum wage, you're right. If we're talking about people able to write decent Java code for a reasonable salary, then post your requirements on Slashdot and I expect that you'll find a lot of applicants.
If you talk about people who know the JVM and JIT engine inside and out and can optimize JavaFX for the next gen Blu-Ray players - yeah, you'll get lots of applicants perhaps. But chances are none are even remotely qualified. If you're the manager in charge of this I can guarantee you will never find the people you need and you will ALWAYS have open reqs. If a qualified engineer were to knock on your door you count your blessings and hire them! Conversely, you can't treat them like shit or they walk out the door, and they'll tell all the other ten qualified engineers in the valley - because they all know each other from some past job and meet over pizza and beer every so often - after which you can't find a replacement, period. Eventually YOUR boss will figure out YOU are the obstacle to staffing and get rid of YOU.
Re:So obvious question... (Score:4, Informative)
Oracle makes 90% of its profits from support contracts renewals [informationweek.com]. Customers renew to get continued support for whatever Oracle sold them, and to get access to the newer versions. We'd have to ask them to get actual numbers, but say x% renew because they want support/upgrades for Oracle DB, y% renew because they want support/upgrades for some enterprise app, surely z% renew because they want support/upgrades for JVM/Netbeans/some other Java bollocks.
Re:So obvious question... (Score:2, Informative)
Visual Studio is free? Team Foundation Server is free? Biz Talk Server is free? SQL Server is free?
Re:PostgreSQL (Score:3, Informative)
Here is a good basis to start reading. For whatever reason, people forget there are numerous commercial PostgreSQL offerings. If you need to compete with Oracle on the high end, PostgreSQL absolutely has solutions [enterprisedb.com], as do many other companies.
Re:So obvious question... (Score:2, Informative)
Team Foundation Server is not a requirement for
Biz Talk Server isn't directly for
SQL Server Express [microsoft.com] is free.
Next time, troll harder please.