Oracle: Proud, Self-Reliant, Increasingly Isolated

jfruhlinger writes "One of Oracle's stated purposes when it bought Sun more than two years ago was to create full-stack appliances: SPARC servers running Solaris or Oracle Linux and Oracle's suite of app servers and of course its omnipresent database. Its new T4 processor is a reaffirmation of that strategy. But has the company painted itself into a corner? While it's cautiously embraced the cloud, its cloud services don't work with Windows or other companies' offerings, which kills much of their potential value; meanwhile, they've managed to alienate open source developers and big swaths of the Java community. It seems that Oracle's inability to play well with others is locking them out of the multipolar future."

Anecdote....

[TheCarp]

So we had some problems with how Nagios stock plugins interact with Solaris Zpools...under certain circumstances, it can read a filesystem as full even when it has plenty of space (less than half full). In looking for a solution, I found a check on the exchange that was written to use the zpool tools to check. I found a minor bug in the check, fixed it, deployed it, and sent a patch to the original author.

His reply? He thanked me, but informed me that it was of no use to him anymore as his company migrated everything off of Solaris rather than deal with Oracle.

So I would say yes, this sounds about right.

Migration to MS SQL Server

[jazman_777]

Is Microsoft better than Oracle? I kind of see it as the East Front: Nazi Germany against Communist Russia. Can't they just destroy each other completely?

Oracle and the Java Community

[karianna]

FYI - I'm the London JUG [meetup.com] co-leader, we have a seat on the Java Standards Body (aka the JCP) and I've seen first hand the Oracle and Java community challenges :-).

I think Oracle's record with the Java community is turning around in the right direction. They clearly didn't know how to the deal with the community to begin with, but I'll give em credit for trying their damnedest to get better at it! For example:

• They offer amazing amounts of (no strings attached) support to the Java User Groups (we've certainly had it better than we did under Sun). They put their $/£ where their mouth is and offer logistical support for user group events to boot (again, no strings attached).
• They set a date for Java 7, and they delivered the darn thing.
• They're working on the JCP reforms, starting with openness and transparency (JSR-348 [java.net]) and they will have a follow-up JSR to address all of the legal/licensing etc concerns (promises to be a humdinger of a mailing list).
• They've gotten a number of major community players into the OpenJDK (some will argue dubiously, but hey having Apple, SAP, IBM, RedHat on board is not to be sneezed at).

Now before the sceptics spit out their coffee:

• Have they screwed up a bunch of times? Yeah sure they have, Hudson/Jenkins, the Java Web Start thing and a few others.
• Do they communicate in a way that the community would like them to? Definitely not always, they like to keep silent until they get the official ducks in a row.
• Are there issues around legal/licensing? Heck yes. and that's going to make for an interesting 2012, I suggest you become part of the JCP process so you can have your say.

So there's definitely stuff to work on, but they are listening and the community has worked with them on many occasions in the past year to get some really cool things done. Let's not forget they're mainly individual engineers like you and I trying to do the very best they can for the platform.

Now I'm off to put on my Kevlar ;-)