An anonymous reader points out Glyn Moody's thought experiment: what if Oracle bought up the entire open source ecosystem? Who would win, who would lose? And how might an open ecosystem grow in the wake of such an event? "Recently, there was an interesting rumour circulating that Oracle had a war chest of some $70 billion, and was going on an acquisition spree. Despite the huge figure, it had a certain plausibility, because Oracle is a highly successful company with deep pockets and an aggressive management. The rumour was soon denied, but suppose Oracle decided to spend, if not $70 billion, say $10 billion in an efficient way: how might it do that? One rather dramatic use of that money would be to buy up the leading open source companies — all of them."

Trailrunner7 writes "In an effort to enlist more help finding bugs in its most popular software — Firefox, Thunderbird, and Firefox Mobile — Mozilla is jacking up the bounty it pays to researchers who report security flaws to $3,000. 'For new bugs reported starting July 1st, 2010 UTC we are changing the bounty payment to $3,000 US per eligible security bug. A lot has changed in the 6 years since the Mozilla program was announced, and we believe that one of the best ways to keep our users safe is to make it economically sustainable for security researchers to do the right thing when disclosing information,' said Lucas Adamski, director of security engineering at Mozilla. In addition to Mozilla, Google also has established a bug bounty program — though at $500 it has been called 'insulting.' None of the larger software vendors such as Microsoft or Oracle have taken that step. Some researchers see that as inevitable, however."

echolinux writes "Frustrated by Oracle's refusal to interact with the OpenSolaris community or speak with the OpenSolaris Governing Board, the OGB has issued an ultimatum to Oracle: designate a liaison to the OGB by August 16th or the board will 'take action at the August 23 meeting to trigger the clause in the OGB charter that will return control of the community to Oracle.'"

GMGruman writes "In an InfoWorld blog, Paul Krill suggests that those concerned that Java might get lost in Oracle's tangle of acquired technologies should relax a little: Java's future isn't wholly in Oracle's hands, so if Oracle screws up or lets Java languish, the popular language has other forces to move it forward nonetheless."

CWmike writes "Oracle is being sued by the US government for allegedly overcharging it by millions of dollars, according to documents on file in US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The US General Services Administration's Schedules are supposed to provide discounts that are as good as or better than that given to the vendor's most favored customers, the complaint states. However, Oracle employee Paul Frascella, who joins the government's action, learned that Oracle was finding ways around the GSA restrictions in order to give commercial customers even deeper discounts, according to the complaints. In one alleged practice Oracle was said to be 'selling to a reseller at a deep discount ... and having the reseller sell the product to the end user at a price below the written maximum allowable discounts,' the complaint states. Overall, Oracle's actions cost US taxpayers 'tens of millions of dollars,' it adds."

snydeq writes "Results from the 2010 Eclipse User Survey reveal interesting trends surrounding open source usage and opinions, writes InfoWorld's Savio Rodrigues. Linux usage among developers is on the rise, at the expense of Windows, and MySQL has pulled ahead of Oracle, by a factor of 3-to-2, as the database of choice among Eclipse developers. 'The data demonstrate that fears surrounding Oracle's control over MySQL have not resulted in lower use of MySQL in favor of an alternative open source database,' Rodrigues writes."

boer lee writes with the news that you can expect trouble in downloading firmware updates for your Sun server if you purchased it before March 16, 2010. "In a somewhat surprising move (and without any notification to customers), Oracle shut down public access to firmware downloads. I learned this the hard way when I contacted Oracle customer service almost two weeks ago. Yes, it took 13 days for me to get access to the firmware download for systems under the standard warranty (i.e. less than a year old)."

1sockchuck writes "Separating the hot and cold air in a data center is one of the keys to improving energy efficiency. But containment systems don't have to be fancy or expensive, as Google showed in a presentation Thursday, which discussed the use of clear vinyl curtains in isolating hot and cold aisles. Containment systems have been in use at least since 2004, but there's an ongoing debate about whether it is best to contain the hot aisle or cold aisle. Leading vendors are split as well, as APC advances hot aisle containment while Emerson/Liebert champions a cold aisle approach. What say Slashdot readers? Do you use containment in your data center? If so, do you contain the hot aisle or cold aisle?"

snydeq writes "Recent silence regarding the future of OpenSolaris under Oracle's hand has InfoWorld blogger Savio Rodrigues questioning the relative importance of open code. 'Source code availability is a central factor in establishing trust in the open source community, as knowledge that the source is available can often allay fears about the future of a particular open source project or product. And yet, this trust can often be overstated,' Rodrigues writes. Members of the OpenSolaris community have been agitating for Oracle to clarify its plans for OpenSolaris in the wake of its acquisition of Sun, with some suggesting a fork as a way of severing ties. But, as Rodrigues points out, 'The community around an open source project or product can certainly be vibrant without having the resources to support a fork. In fact, this is true for many open source communities, which count numerous members, very few of whom would be qualified to develop the open source project further should a fork occur. Worse, even fewer would be interested in doing so.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Since Oracle's acquisition of Sun, all open source projects that now have Oracle as their primary sponsor are worried about their future, and FUD is spreading quickly. Very few public statements have been made by Oracle executives, particularly regarding OpenSolaris. The community is arguing about the difficulties of forking the code base when most (if not all) of the developers are employed by Oracle. Now Oracle wants the community to prove that open source can be made profitable. What arguments can the Slashdot crowd provide to convince Oracle about that?" Reader greg1104 tips related news about licenses for Solaris. According to an account manager, "Solaris support now comes through a contract on the hardware (Oracle SUN hardware)."

Trailrunner7 writes "In a sudden about-face, Sun has rushed out a Java update to fix a drive-by download vulnerability that exposed Windows users to in-the-wild malware attacks. The patch comes less than a week after Sun told a Google researcher it did not consider the issue serious enough to warrant an out-of-cycle patch and less than a day after researchers spotted live exploits on a booby-trapped Web site. The flaw, which was also discovered independently by Ruben Santamarta, occurs because the Java-Plugin Browser is running 'javaws.exe' without validating command-line parameters. Despite the absence of documentation, a researcher was about to figure out that Sun removed the code to run javaws.exe from the Java plugin. The about-face by Sun is another sign that some big vendors still struggle to understand the importance of working closely with white hat researchers to understand the implications of certain vulnerabilities. In this case, Google's Tavis Ormandy was forced to use the full-disclosure weapon to force the vendor into a proper response."

Thrashing Rage writes "James Gosling has confirmed he is leaving Sun/Oracle: 'Yes, indeed, the rumors are true: I resigned from Oracle a week ago (April 2nd). I apologize to everyone in St. Petersburg who came to TechDays on Thursday expecting to hear from me. I really hated not being there. As to why I left, it's difficult to answer: just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good. The hardest part is no longer being with all the great people I've had the privilege to work with over the years. I don't know what I'm going to do next, other than take some time off before I start job hunting.'"

blackbearnh writes "Brian Aker, former Sun MySQL guy, and current proponent of the Drizzle MySQL fork, gave O'Reilly Radar an update on where MySQL is at the moment. During the interview, he was asked to speculate on Oracle's original motives for acquiring Sun. 'IBM has been moving their pSeries systems into datacenter after datacenter, replacing Sun-based hardware. I believe that Oracle saw this and asked themselves, "What is the next thing that IBM is going to do?" That's easy. IBM is going to start pushing DB2 and the rest of their software stack into those environments. Now whether or not they'll be successful, I don't know. I suspect once Oracle reflected on their own need for hardware to scale up on, they saw a need to dive into the hardware business. I'm betting that they looked at Apple's margins on hardware, and saw potential in doing the same with Sun's hardware business. I'm sure everything else Sun owned looked nice and scrumptious, but Oracle bought Sun for the hardware.'"

Trailrunner7 writes "Joanna Rutkowska, a security researcher known for her work on virtualization security and low-level rootkits, has released a new open-source operating system meant to provide isolation of the OS's components for better security. The OS, called Qubes, is based on Xen, X and Linux, and is in a basic, alpha stage right now. Qubes relies on virtualization to separate applications running on the OS and also places many of the system-level components in sandboxes to prevent them from affecting each other. 'Qubes lets the user define many security domains implemented as lightweight virtual machines (VMs), or 'AppVMs.' E.g. users can have 'personal,' 'work,' 'shopping,' 'bank,' and 'random' AppVMs and can use the applications from within those VMs just like if they were executing on the local machine, but at the same time they are well isolated from each other. Qubes supports secure copy-and-paste and file sharing between the AppVMs, of course.'" Xen's also just reached 4.0; some details below.

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions Oracle's ability to revive interest in Java in the wake of Oracle VP Jeet Kaul's announcement at EclipseCon that he would 'like to see people with piercings doing Java programming.' 'If Kaul is hoping Java will once again attract youthful, cutting-edge developers, as it did when it debuted in 1995, [Kaul] may be in for a long wait,' McAllister writes. 'Java has evolved from a groundbreaking, revolutionary language platform to something closer to a modern-day version of Cobol.' And, as McAllister sees it, 'Nothing screams "get off my lawn" like a language controlled by Oracle, the world's largest enterprise software vendor. The chances that Java can attract the mohawks-and-tattoos set today seem slimmer than ever.'"

rubycodez writes "Oracle, having acquired Sun Microsystems, including its Unix, will no longer give away free Solaris licenses. Oracle also states that some features of its Oracle Solaris will not appear in OpenSolaris, which means OpenSolaris may start to die."

An anonymous reader writes "Recently, the Oracle/Sun conglomerate has denied public download access to all service packs for Solaris unless you have a support contract. Now, paying a premium for gold-class service is nothing new in the industry, but withholding critical security updates smacks of extortion. While this pay-for-play model may be de rigueur for enterprise database systems, it is certainly not the norm for OS manufactures. What may be more interesting is how Oracle/Sun is able to sidestep GNU licensing requirements since several of the Solaris cluster packs contain patches to GNU utilities and applications."

mdm42 writes "OpenSSO is one of the best open source web Single Sign On projects out there. Sun Microsystems made OpenSSO open source in 2008, so it's sad to see how, after absorbing Sun, Oracle is shutting down this amazing project, labelling it 'not strategic' and dismembering the few parts they think are worthwhile for their own SSO effort. They started by freezing the next express release, and during the last few weeks they have been removing all the open source downloads from the OpenSSO website and removing content from the wiki. Fortunately, a Norwegian company called ForgeRock has stepped up to the plate in an attempt to salvage the project under the new name OpenAM."

suraj.sun tips a report up at CNet which begins: "Browser makers, grappling with outmoded technology and a vision to rebuild the Web as a foundation for applications, have begun converging on a seemingly basic but very important element of cloud computing. That ability is called local storage, and the new mechanism is called Indexed DB. Indexed DB, proposed by Oracle and initially called WebSimpleDB, is largely just a prototype at this stage, not something Web programmers can use yet. But already it's won endorsements from Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google, and together, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome account for more than 90 percent of the usage on the Net today. 'Indexed DB is interesting to both Firefox and Microsoft, so if we get to the point where we prototype it and want to ship it, it will have very wide availability,' said Chris Blizzard, director of evangelism for Mozilla. ... Microsoft publicly endorsed Indexed DB on its IE blog: 'Together with Mozilla, we're excited about a new design for local storage called Indexed DB. We think this is a great solution for the Web,' said program manager Adrian Bateman."

abartels writes "It seems like there's been nothing but bad news and resignations coming from Oracle since it finally managed to close the deal on Sun. Finally, there's good news in that Drizzle seems to have a bright future ahead. It just isn't with Oracle, but with the Rackspace Cloud."