Post-Oracle Purchase, How Is Sun's Software Doing? 235
GMGruman writes "Oracle has steadily provoked the open source community since its acquisition of Sun, raising the question of whether the move will simply destroy Sun. But as Paul Krill observes, Oracle has been steadfast in upgrading Sun-derived technologies — and making them profitable, which should mean they will stick around a long time."
VirtualBox seems alive & well (Score:5, Informative)
VirtualBox wasn't mentioned in the article, but when the acquisition was announced, I was really worried about that project. However, the release of VirtualBox 4.0 [virtualbox.org] seems to show that they're still hard at work - not just fixing bugs, but developing new ideas.
I can only hope other Sun projects are doing as well as VirtualBox.
I would say sun is done (Score:5, Informative)
For example, we have a brand new fileserver with 2 hour or so support that is not in production yet. We've needed support on the order of like getting a part and the new Oracle/Sun could not provide the part in a timely fashion. Took like a week. We are now looking at delegating this box to non-critical storage and buying something supported from a reliable vendor. We have also had a number of issues with solaris/zfs file servers hanging. Personally, I'm going to suggest to management that we not buy any more sun equipment. Its simply less reliable and more costly than the same product from Dell or HP running linux.
I don't believe any of the lead developers are still at Oracle/Sun. The java head left, the XML guy left, the lustre people were told to leave and most have. When you are in a service economy, you have to provide service. Hardware is a dime a dozen today. Software is mostly free. And nobody will pay for support when there is no support to be had.
Re:VirtualBox seems alive & well (Score:2, Informative)
Open Solaris, Dead.
OpenOffice, Dead.
Hudson, Dead.
It seems to me that Oracle bought Java, and maybe VirtualBox. The rest of it they threw away.
Note: I do not know, or care what they are doing with the hardware business.
Re:Around with no customers... (Score:4, Informative)
Same here. Also work at a major university that is abandoning a substantial installed Sun/Solaris environment en-masse in favor of Redhat/centos linux.
Re:Documentation died with Sun (Score:4, Informative)
oracle's completely useless "Oracle Documentation" page which seems to be almost entirely about the database.
That's funny I see these links along the right edge of the page:
Berkeley DB
Enterprise Manager
Database EE and XE
Enterprise Pack for Eclipse
Fusion Middleware
Java EE & GlassFish
Java SE
JDeveloper and ADF
MySQL
NetBeans IDE
Pre-built Developer VMs
Solaris 10 & 11 Express
SQL Developer
VM VirtualBox
Zend Server for PHP
I can still find and download the manuals for ALL of my old Sun gear (well except for my old 3/60)
Still happy with Solaris and Oracle gear BUT... (Score:4, Informative)
Simple answer: They're killing Sun utterly! (Score:5, Informative)
We're officially a fairly big customer - somewhere north of 800 Sun servers, if I were to guess. Add another hundred workstations or so, and we're pushing about a thousand machines running Solaris, many of them running Sun apps of one sort or another.
Oracle changed the terms of our software support to the tune of a 500% increase. That's right, they want us to pay SIX TIMES as much for support! We lost all of our training credits overnight (About $100k in training dollars). Our hardware support costs have gone up substantially as well, so we're getting rid of our full-time onsite tech. (with the money we're saving by getting rid of the onsite Sun guy, we're going to hire two hardware techs of our own who are qualified/allowed to work on ALL of our gear, and still have cash left over.)
We are planning to migrate away from all Sun/Oracle applications by the end of the current support contract. Even the groups that were using Oracle Database before this are being strongly encouraged to look elsewhere for solutions.
Ours isn't an isolated case. The general feeling in the Sun customer community is that they're standing on a sinking ship, flailing at the floorboards with an axe to make it go down even faster. Every Sun software product is now in the 'legacy' section of Oracle's (disastrous!!!) website. Contracts have gone from three pages to 500, due to the lack of blanket terms. Oracle is TRYING to piss off their "Sun" customers as much as possible, and are succeeding. Oracle Solaris is going to lose more than 70% of its purchase-time market share by the end of 2013. Separate products (iPlanet, Directory Server, StarOffice, etc.) will all be shot through the head.