Oracle To Stop Developing Sun Virtualization Technologies 145
hypnosec writes "Oracle will soon be announcing its decision to stop development of Sun virtualization technologies including Sun Ray Software and Hardware, Oracle Virtual Desktop Client, and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) product lines. In an update to its support policies [Oracle support login required] for virtualization software and hardware, the database company has revealed that this decision is a result of its efforts to 'tightly align Oracle's future desktop virtualization portfolio investments with Oracle Corporation's overall core business strategy.'"
Re:Clairification- VirtualBox is being continued (Score:5, Interesting)
As I had to RTFA to figure this out, thought I'd pass on that VirtualBox is still going to be actively developed.
Virtualbox development, however, is now going to "tightly align ... with Oracle Corporation's overall core business strategy."
Something tells me we may have a fork, and possibly a shift in Qemu development energy in the future.
VirtualBox should be forked NOW (Score:1, Interesting)
I very much doubt that anyone on the planet still lives in that happy place where Oracle continues open source development of VirtualBox indefinitely with no strings attached.
After the Java debacle against Google's Dalvik, it's abundantly clear that Oracle harbors no love for open source at all, and just sees it as a way of getting a lot of people dependent on its code ready for the harvesting.
Because of this, I recommend forking VirtualBox sooner rather than later. The fork doesn't have to be anything more than an exact mirror for as long as Ellison doesn't release his legal dogs. But he will, that much is certain.
Re:Fuck you Oracle (Score:4, Interesting)
It might have worked, if everybody actually using Solaris had also bought SUN x86 servers instead of installing it on generic hardware and bought more software from their stack. Additionally, for too long their business strategy seemed to be "Let's invent some mind-blowingly cool stuff and then have sales try to sell it to our customers".
And this not for one product, but basically for almost all of the products they came up with in the last years.
Oracle has no choice but to milk their current customers literally till the sun goes down.
Re:Fuck you Oracle (Score:5, Interesting)
I have to agree. While everyone kind of liked SUN and cherished their accomplishments - few ever bought anything of them.
It might have worked, if everybody actually using Solaris had also bought SUN x86 servers instead of installing it on generic hardware and bought more software from their stack. Additionally, for too long their business strategy seemed to be "Let's invent some mind-blowingly cool stuff and then have sales try to sell it to our customers".
And this not for one product, but basically for almost all of the products they came up with in the last years.
Oracle has no choice but to milk their current customers literally till the sun goes down.
No kidding. Sun's x86 hardware kicked ass. Unlike Dell and even HP, Sun actually engineered their x86 servers. They didn't just slap cheap-ass commodity components around the CPU.
A recent customer went through a lot of trouble replace "old" Sun x86 hardware that had been around four or five years with new HP hardware - to "save money", because HP's servers were cheaper than Oracle's servers (that Sun designed...).
Note I said "cheaper", not "less expensive". Yeah, the HP's were cheaper than the Sun servers. And slower. The four or five-year-old Sun x86 boxes were a shitload FASTER than the brand-spanking-new HP servers. Talk about a bunch of howling developers. I was laughing my ass off.
And even with the Oracle markup, after my customer had to go out and buy licences for software to manage HP servers - OOOOOPS! (iLO software, etc), the HP boxes turned out to be more expensive than the equivalent Oracle (nee Sun) servers. At least Oracle doesn't charge extra for things like that.
HP's servers also came with cheap off-brand FC HBAs that wouldn't play nice on the customer's SAN. Good God, crappy FC hardware that can't interoperate with other vendor's equipment was solved by QLogic et al a fucking decade ago.