Oracle Top Execs Answer Sun Employee Questions 207
The Register writes "Sun invited Oracle president Charles Phillips and chief corporate architect Edward Screven to an employee-only town hall this Wednesday, where they took questions on what's coming. They said they'd be 'crazy' to close Java, that Oracle 'needs' MySQL, and all Sun's processors look appealing. They hedged on OpenOffice — Phillips said he couldn't comment on any product line — and on Sun's work in high-performance computing. Screven made it pretty clear the Sun vision of cloud computing does not fit with Oracle's; Oracle sees itself as a provider of infrastructure like virtualization to make clouds, not a provider of hosted services. As for who's staying and who's getting cut at Sun: Phillips said Oracle needs Sun, but warned 'tough decisions' will be coming. Don't forget, this is the company that couriered pink slips to the PeopleSoft staff it cut following that acquisition."
Here's praying... (Score:4, Insightful)
...that they don't decide to GPL Solaris. Really don't want to see my favorite OS pulled apart and canibalized to fuel the growing Linux hegemony. Let's keep some diversity and competition in the Unix market!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Here's praying... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Here's praying... (Score:5, Funny)
and a user base to rape!
Dude, have you SEEN the user base? Not even with someone else's dick.
Re:Here's praying... (Score:4, Insightful)
That would be really bad (and is very unlikely event).
Solaris 10 is pretty much last commercial Unix which does suck but only moderately. Because only alternatives are HP-UX (dead man crawling) and AIX (IBM Global Services' private toy).
[ OK, AIX too does suck only moderately, but it's just IBM is active in relatively few markets/regions (what/how they sell/support depends on region). You can buy it, but you will not get much support from them. ]
Many companies have strategic partnership with Sun solely for its ability to provide stable, well integrated with the hardware Unix.
P.S. Though, honestly, more and more companies which had enough intelligence in past to have good relationship with Sun, also used that intelligence other way around and evaluated/deployed Linux already long time ago - everywhere where it was feasible.
Re:Here's praying... (Score:5, Funny)
... to pillage and a user base to rape!
Always rape BEFORE you pillage (and burn)!
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Linux doesn't need Solaris to be GPL'd. All the cool new stuff that Solaris came out with years ago should be in Linux any day now.
Any day now...
Re: (Score:2)
What, like ZFS [blogspot.com]?
Where's all my cool Linux stuff on Solaris, though?
Re: (Score:2)
I think the work they are doing with ZFS on Fuse is commendable and I don't mean to belittle the efforts of any of the developers in my attempt at a funny dig above...
but, you wouldn't run a 0.5.0 beta version of a filesystem in production.
Re: (Score:2)
Here [opensolaris.org]?
OK, so it's not an "all". :-)
Wish dtrace was under a GPL compatible license... :-)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't matter what license dtrace is under.
dtrace exposes Solaris kernel internals. Porting that to Linux even if the license was compatible would be very non-trivial.
BSD and Solaris at least have a common ancestry, while Linux isn't related to anything else.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Porting dtrace would be useless, Linux has pretty much catched up in that front - the only piece missing is the merge of utrace in the main kernel. In distros like Fedora, which include utrace, you already can use systemtap to probe both the kernel and userspace without problems (sure, it lacks the "final polish" of dtrace, but all the hard has been done)
Re: (Score:2)
I think the "hard work" IS the final polish! Unless you're simply copying someone else's interface...
systemtap? (Score:2)
Porting dtrace would be useless, Linux has pretty much catched up in that front - the only piece missing is the merge of utrace in the main kernel. In distros like Fedora, which include utrace, you already can use systemtap to probe both the kernel and userspace without problems (sure, it lacks the "final polish" of dtrace, but all the hard has been done)
Please... an attempt to copy dtrace, and not a very good one at that [sun.com].
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Ahh, the SystemtapdtraceComparison [sourceware.org] answered my question: systemtap can do nothing.
Systemtap lacks the following features dtrace has:
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
BSD and Solaris at least have a common ancestry, while Linux isn't related to anything else.
No, they don't. SunOS was BSD-based. Solaris is based on Sys V AT&T Unix. Solaris couldn't be further from BSD.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Btrfs is supposed to be the Linux FS that will be comparable to ZFS.
ZFS can be had through FUSE as well.
And for an alternative to dtrace there's systemtap.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
ZFS on Fuse is not production ready.
Btrfs came from oracle and I think they're still the largest contributor.
Now Oracle will hve ZFS on an operating system they have a large financial interest in (most oracle deployments are still on solaris/sparc according to ellison) and now they own it.
I'ts going to be interesting to see what Oracle does. They could possibly use ZFS to get btrfs further along, but it's beneficial to their bottom line to keep some goodies all to Solaris.
Re:Here's praying... (Score:4, Funny)
Where's all my cool Linux stuff on Solaris, though?
I'm sure you could just compile cygwin ... :-P
Re:Here's praying... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a sysadmin for a government contractor and we support many Linux distributions and some real Unix, but most commonly deploy RHEL boxes. My experience with RHEL has been lackluster: yum is retarded, the package selection is silly (Debian does much better at this), software compatibility between versions is awful, and its init scripts and management tools are ridiculous.
Solaris offers solutions to a lot of these problems. The solaris systems management agent is well-designed and extremely helpful; there is nothing like this in the "enterprise" linux distributions I've seen. The solaris package management tool is simple and effective. The solaris backwards compatibility guarantee is invaluable, and the kernel contract system gives me a superior way to make sure essential services stay up. And these are smaller features.
Add to the above a superior IP stack, ZFS, zones (I have customized Xen and deployed it in a production environment and it's great, but doesn't replace zones), dtrace, etc., and you have a truly enterprise OS. No current Linux distro offers this. I'm sad to think that the great project that is Opensolaris might be canned.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Zones != VMware / xen.
VMware and Xen run separate instances of OSes. Zones isolate virtual servers within a single OS instance. The requirements (especially memory) for zones tend to be significantly less than for hypervisors.
Linux is GPLv2 only! (Score:3, Insightful)
If they released it under the GPLv3, it still couldn't be cannibalized for Linux (which perversely insisted on staying with v2, which they'll now be stuck with forever), and could immediately become the FSF's OS of choice. Which would be pretty cool, IMO. GNU/Solaris would be a much better system, I think, than anything else out there currently including both GNU/Linux and Solaris. (GNU coreutils, among other things, kick ass on anything else out there.) Heck, I think it would probably edge out the stil
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Have you looked into Nexenta [nexenta.org]. Solaris Kernel with a userland more familiar to Linux users. I've heard people refer to it as the Ubuntu of Solaris.
OpenSolaris Nevada (the distro from Sun) led by Ian Murdock (the Ian in Debian), is supposed to be more gnu-y too.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
PORT to HURD! C'mon! I have GNUsletters that were MAILED to me in '89, promising the GNU OS! They had STAMPS on them! I could order TAPES of the EMACS sources from them!
Re: (Score:2)
I'm bookmarking your comment, every time I feel like a horrible procrastinator I'm going to read it.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, for OpenOffice.org that might be its saving grace. The best thing that could happen to the Open Source movement is if Oracle decides to stop actively developing OOo - in that way other projects will be actively hacked on without the stranglehold that Sun has had on the market. And those projects will probably use - you guessed it - the GPL.
Re:No One Takes The Viral GPL Seriously Anymore (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the problem with open source office suits is an office suite dosen't get anybody laid [jwz.org], so there is little enthusiasm from people not paid to do it. If you want to use an MS clone the Openoffice is fine, but there is never going to be any innovation unless it comes from another company, so the best hope is to open up the development and get all the companies on board with something, but given its slowness and dependance on java i don't think even that will result in a good product, its best for it to die and novell,linux foundation,red hat, etc, to put their effort into gnumeric,abiword,etc, (maybe rip out the good parts of openoffice and put them in libraries).
Re: (Score:2)
an office suite dosen't get anybody laid
Luckily the guy doing the NeoOffice port is married.
Re:No One Takes The Viral GPL Seriously Anymore (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, even married people dream of getting laid someday.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, Abiword was going quite well before OpenOffice.org appeared on the scene. Then there was a perception that nothing more needed to be done. If Oracle takes away the development from that product, it can only be a good thing for all those other projects. Because the real problem is that without Sun's development effort the project will just shrivel up and die. Unlike something like Mozilla, where a lot of people are working on the browser.
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps you don't understand GPL but its viral nature is great for its copyright owners, I can make a product that if any other company tries to improve they have to pay me for copyright OR release all their changes for free. If oracle GPL solaris, they get to keep their hold on it and see what the Linux community can do with it, while any company wanting to make money of the code base has to pay them.
Re: (Score:2)
If something is GPL AND i own the copyright to it (as oracle do with openoffice) a company can either GPL additional code (which despite what you claim means unless you really trust your customers it will be available for free shortly after) OR pay oracle for license's and release a closed source product.
Re:No One Takes The Viral GPL Seriously Anymore (Score:4, Informative)
You guys are talking past each other. But in essence that is how MySQL is set up. They will license you a proprietary source copy, or you can use the Open Source one under a differing set of terms. Of course the packages themselves are somewhat different too.
Sell OpenOffice to IBM (Score:5, Interesting)
Now that Lotus have integrated OpenOffice into Notes 8 Standard and are also pushing Symphony, they are the ones with the incentive to ensure the OO momentum is maintained (not to mention ODF).
Re: (Score:2)
That's a good argument why being sold to IBM would be good for OOo as a product line, but not for why selling OOo to IBM would be good for Oracle.
Has Microsoft Office (and Access, in particular) helped Microsoft self SQL Server? Could a succesful office suite help IBM move DB2? If so, does it make any sense for Oracle
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know. I think OpenOffice.org could be important to Oracle.
Many people are surprised to hear that Oracle is the second largest software company. With OpenOffice.org adding 3 million users a week, it's a good place to put Oracle's logo.
Re: (Score:2)
Whew. I'm glad to hear that the future of the Linux desktop is safely in the hands of Lotus. :P
Uh Cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)
Screven made it pretty clear the Sun vision of cloud computing does not fit with Oracle's; Oracle sees itself as a provider of infrastructure like virtualization to make clouds, not a provider of hosted services.
Uhm... That's one of the things Sun is doing with cloud computing that I don't think others are.
All the cloud stuff is, is virtualization and infrastructure. Jonathan Schwartz himself has said that if you're not comfortable putting your stuff on a public cloud they'll bring the cloud to you.
They've been doing cool stuff with their virtualization and provisioning systems.
Re:Uh Cloud? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, exactly. I wish more people would speak to this side of "cloud" computing.
What we want is two have redundant "pools" of server and applications. Those pools usually run at 2 or more data centers.
We pull the plug on one data center and clients of those servers and application automatically switch. We have more apps, need more servers for a cluster, or more space we just add on to the thing in a fairly automated fashion.
I'd like this at the intranet level. We have lots of various legacy and web based apps that I want to be able to run in 2 datacenters.
When the system fails our internal network in conjunction with the "cloud" software will switch so one of the clouds takes over the same IPs.
Putting servers in public clouds is for startup web applications, the scientific community, some niche apps(like using Amazon s3 for clusterable storage) and maybe small businesses. No way in heck we are putting our emails and our documents up on someone else servers. Being a public company I don't even think we could with all the SOX crap.
Re:Uh Cloud? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think that's the direction sun want's to go with their private cloud stuff. It was called N1 but I'm not sure what's it's called now.
As a large public company, you may not be able to put everything in the cloud like you said, but some stuff you could.
Imagine your public website gets a predictable amount of traffic but every other press release brings a huge spike in traffic, so you have built out your system to handle the peak times so your hardware mostly sits idle.
You could have your own cloud provision spares, but since it's not sensitive data, you can provision computing power from public clouds, like amazon ec2 and just pay for what you need.
OK, maybe not the best scenario but I wanted an excuse to post this link to this Sun HPC software demo [youtube.com] that shows Grid Engine sending jobs to private servers, then going to private spares, then pulling in Amazon EC2 instances to handle the load.
remember, sun != peoplesoft (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
In the case of Oracle, you have a company that makes an obscenely bloated, broken, overpriced software package that has caused havoc and pain across the continent.
Fixed that for ya
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Fixed again!
Re:remember, sun != peoplesoft (Score:4, Interesting)
Just so you know... Sun did nothing to PS. It was Oracle who bought PS and canned the staff (just as they've done for many acquisitions).
FWIW, it's now several years later, and the "PeopleCode" (seriously, that's what they called it at Peoplesoft) is just as borked as ever... the JDEdwards/PS integration is no closer... I think Oracle's strategy is to move PS clients over to Oracle Apps and drop PS.
Now if only they can unbork Oracle Apps...
Re:remember, sun != peoplesoft (Score:5, Interesting)
Many PeopleSoft employees moved into our Montreal office.
As someone whose been through an Oracle acquisition, I can say that Oracle actually handles that nicely. It's a bit of a culture clash, coming from a small vertical market company, but they dont savagely trash acquisition content.
They do get rid of non-essential personnel but they give you a chance to move on to current products, and they not only support acquired products for many years, they also keep staff around to make sure these products aren't just backed by paperwork and a web page.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed.
I worked with Oracle recently. There were several former JD Edwards staff around, from a previous acquisition. They were kept to support JDE 'legacy' but also given training to cross-skill on other Oracle offerings.
So the immediate response to the acquisition of Oracle should not be to panic. Oracle may eventually ditch some offerings aren't going to make them money (javafx, Sun's speculative gamble, springs to mind) while others will be fused into Oracle's flagship offerings (e.g. weblogic replacing
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
an obscenely bloated, broken, overpriced software package that has caused havoc and pain across the continent.
Hey! My company uses Peoplesoft software! I'm... I'm...
Yeah, you're right. God forbid anything goes off the rails here. The only way to fix it is pretend nothing went wrong, and then fake the next thing to compensate.
Re: (Score:2)
Oracle wasn't peoplesoft either, until they bought them. Their homegrown ERP systems were even *worse*, if you can imagine worse..
But i agree with the premise that what made Sun Microsystems what it was, is gone now.
Long live Sun.
Re: peoplesoft (Score:2)
It's all relative. Actually one of PeopleSoft's claims to fame in the early days was that it was less bloated than many of its competitors: you could run it on modest hardware, even on a PC, and have it function (function well is another thing). Oracle's own homegrown application software is huge, complex, resource intensive, and lacks any kind of modular architecture. Now after all these acquisitions Oracle has the good (or at least less bad), the bad, and the ugly all together.
Why Hedge on Open Office? (Score:3, Interesting)
So, Oracle admits they 'need' MySQL, which may or may not complement their core business, but then ducks a question on the future of OpenOffice, saying they can't comment on any product line. Isn't MySQL a product line, too? Why comment on the future of one and not the other? Sun employees, start twisting in the wind...
Re: (Score:2)
How It Went Down (Score:5, Insightful)
"OMG I work in . will I get laid off?"
"No no, no one will be laid off. All of Sun is important to us."
2 months from now when everyone from Sun will be ancient history.
--Wanted to link that pic of the Iraq guy at the press conference, obviously lying, with his hands in a "simmer down" gesture, but I can't find it. Maybe it wasn't Iraq. I dunno. Someone find it.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Wanted to link that pic of the Iraq guy at the press conference, obviously lying, with his hands in a "simmer down" gesture, but I can't find it. Maybe it wasn't Iraq. I dunno. Someone find it.
Methinks you are a bit unclear on how this whole Internet thing works.
Re: (Score:2)
Wanted to link that pic of the Iraq guy at the press conference, obviously lying, with his hands in a "simmer down" gesture, but I can't find it. Maybe it wasn't Iraq. I dunno. Someone find it.
This is /. Go back to /r/ where you belong.
Re: (Score:2)
http://images.google.com/images?q=iraq+information+minister [google.com] -- 2nd image.
http://z.about.com/d/politicalhumor/1/0/E/8/baghdadbob.jpg [about.com]
Re: (Score:2)
INFORMATION minister.
I was looking for defense minister, press secretary, press conference, liar, damage control, etc.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh please. Sure they'll lay off a lot of people (I suspect most of sales and marketing is toast) but they're not going to spend $5 billion on a bunch of product lines only to fire all the people who create and maintain them. Some products will probably die, but not most of them.
Re:How It Went Down (Score:4, Insightful)
they're not going to spend $5 billion on a bunch of product lines only to fire all the people who create and maintain them.
They spent $10 billion on a bunch of product lines, only to fire everybody when the bought PeopleSoft. Based on Oracle's history, there's no reason to think they wouldn't fire every single current Sun employee.
Your counter-argument seems to be "but, but, that would be stupid of them!". Well, yeah, this is Oracle we're talking about here. Have you ever tried to install Oracle?
Re:How It Went Down (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer: Oracle employee
No, they didn't fire everybody. There were layoffs, but there were also many PeopleSoft employees that became Oracle employees. The current client engagement that I am on has two such people.
Maybe you meant "they fired a bunch of people", which is inevitable with any merger or takeover. But they didn't fire EVERYONE.
Re: (Score:2)
Professional services is its own world in any large company. Near where I live, there were large PeopleSoft buildings that has no survivors. Hmm, Googleing around suggests that "only" half of the employees were ayed off at the time of acquitision. Perhaps this was biased towards development/central office workers, as the impression here in Silly Valley was one of complete devestation.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm only speaking for myself as an individual, and not on behalf of the company, of course. :)
I don't see it as either a threat or a check, simply because Oracle and Microsoft are in two totally different markets. They both fall under software, but Microsoft's main baby is the Windows OS for both home desktop and server, whereas Oracle is trying to become #1 in providing a total solution in enterprise software.
Re:How It Went Down (Score:5, Insightful)
So you must concur that its fucking hell to install?
How am I supposed to refute an individual's anecdote? If you find something difficult, how do I deny your experience? As with the installation of any software that requires post-install tailoring to fit your business needs, YMMV.
Re: (Score:2)
I find it interesting that the Oracle employee DID NOT refute the line: Have you ever tried to install Oracle? So you must concur that its fucking hell to install?
If you think Oracle is hard to install, then I would stay out of enterprise-sized gigs. I can think of a half-dozen products that cost a similar amount of money that are truly hell to install. Oracle is cake to install. Yes, I've installed numerous Oracle products and I've never had a significant issue installing them.
True, it's not 'apt-get oracle' but if you read the docs, they walk you through it, and I have had zero problems on several different flavors of Unix and Windows installing Oracle DBs and o
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Peoplesoft was competing with Oracle and oracle killed it to get rid of them, sun in the other hand was not competing with oracle - except for mysql, but why would them waste 7000 millions to get rid of mysql? In fact, sun as a company was dying. So this seems a completely different move. Either they were interested on not letting IBM/HP get bigger, or they are really interested in Sun. I think that both options are possible
Re: (Score:2)
Read something besides the blogosphere now and then. Most PeopleSoft employees are still working at PeopleSoft products. The folks who lost their jobs were mostly support, legal, sales, and other jobs that Oracle already had covered. A lot of stuff has been rebranded, but it's got the same people developing it.
At the time Oracle bought PS. A lot of experts were saying that they'd just kill it. As often happens, they experts were full of shit.
Re: (Score:2)
Look at Oracle's history in terms of buying companies and keeping on the staff.
Also, they were dumb enough to buy Sun in the first place.
Re:How It Went Down (Score:4, Informative)
They laid off a lot of people. They never laid off everybody. In fact, they've actually laid off a lot fewer people than you expect. Several times they've acquired companies that were basically competition, and everybody predicted they'd just fold them up, fire everybody, and move all the customer to Oracle products. But they haven't done it. Didn't do it with PeopleSoft. Didn't do it with RDB.
Also, they were dumb enough to buy Sun in the first place.
Right. They're only the second-largest software vendor on the planet. They couldn't possibly walk and chew gum at the same time. I'm sure Larry just told his underlings, "Hey, we have too much cash, and I'm bored. Take $7 billion, buy Sun, then fire everybody."
BTW, have you every managed anything more complicated than a beer run? I suspect not.
No talk about Solaris (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No talk about Solaris (Score:5, Interesting)
The day the sale was announced Sun/Oracle had a conference call where Larry Ellison said two of the main reasons they were buying Sun were Solaris and Java. Solaris was the best Unix technology out there he said.
Selling the hardware business to HP was part of a different deal in the bast where Oracle and HP were going to buy different parts of Sun but IBM blocked it according to the article.
Nothing in the recent sale, other than some bloggers speculation, indicates they will be selling off the hardware units.
"...helped develop the Linux kernel..." (Score:3, Informative)
Sounds like what a typical politician or an administrator would say.
Nonetheless, here are "Oracle's Technical Contributions to Linux" [contributions sounds so much better than develop]
http://www.oracle.com/technologies/linux/linux-tech-leadership-contributions.html [oracle.com]
and a link to Oracle's "Free and Open Source Software" http://oss.oracle.com/ [oracle.com]
looks extensive
OS X too (Score:2)
Remember the horrifying results at threading performance of OS X compared to Linux on same hardware? It was in first G5 ages.
Oracle could be the one helped the issue to get fixed but there is no proof of that, it is just a rumour. Today OS X doesn't have that issue.
The tool everyone used for benchmarking was mysql btw.
Summary (Score:5, Funny)
Oracle President: See Figure 1 [wordpress.com]
Open Source NeWS! (Score:3, Insightful)
Best thing Sun ever did, and they killed it rather than letting it grow.
Re:Open Source NeWS! (Score:5, Insightful)
What were they supposed to do with NeWS, continue developing it while the rest of the Unix community used X11? If they had, Sun's workstation business would have died about a decade earlier than it did.
Switching to Postgres (Score:5, Interesting)
I talked to my manager today, he said we were going to use Postgres instead of MySQL for out next web project.
In his opinion, the latest stable release had poor support for stored procedures and now this acquisition puts further development into question. He wants to move everything out of MySQL at some point.
Since I have never used Postgres before, I couldn't comment on anything, but from my perspective, MySQL had been moving forward with their database. Even if the stored procedures were not on par with the other DB's out there, they would mature in time.
I was ready to speak up, until I thought about MySQL passing hands for the second time, talks about forks, and finally the developers leaving the company. All those things cannot be good short term, and long term will depend a lot on the parent company.
So for the time being, I think my manager is correct and I did not protest his decision.
Re:Switching to Postgres (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/interactive/xplang.html -- There's more info
Re: (Score:3)
You'll find a lot of pro-PostgreSQL posts in my history, it's very good and I think if you go into it prepared to learn you'll like it too. But I'm not an idiot and throwing away a lot of in-house expertise on MySQL requires some real justification. MySQL has indeed come on a lot since the old days. Unless you really need the more sophisticated features that MySQL doesn't provide (or provides badly), it's usually a good basis for things. There are long-term risks with MySQL - it is already starting to fork
smart; but oracle will love you (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
i think it's shortsighted idea from your boss if the reason alone were based on this.
remember that there are quite few forks on this etc. percona and others.
if you're familiar with mysql .. why not try exporting the data from sun mysql and try to load it up on percona's mysql or monty's mysql and see how it works.
if you're already familiar on administering mysql( and quite good at it ) -- that alone sometimes is worth not to switch.
Re: (Score:2)
We switched to PostgreSQL about a year ago after SUN bought MySQL and it became clear that Sun really didn't know what direction they were going with it.
All our code used database abstraction, so it was just a matter of porting the existing databases.
Sun and Oracle: End of a beautiful dream (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/21/oracle_sun_open_source/
Read every word of it. It's sad but true. I hope that Google finds a way to buy Java off Oracle.
The destruction of a beautiful company (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As someone whose first job out of college was as a programmer at Sun, I can honestly say I will never again work for such an academic, transparent company, and that's sad.
I'm not hating myself for it. It's more like the feeling you get when you think back on a time in your life that you know will never come again. It makes you wish you had appreciated it more at the time, because when it's over, it's over forever. Perhaps a bit too romantic and sentimental, but that's just how I feel about the whole Oracle-
I give the Sun hardware division 4 years (Score:4, Insightful)
before Oracle closes it because of low margins.
Nevermind the obvious synergies and benefits you get from controlling the entire stack -- from CPU to system software to applications. See: APPLE
Chip H.
The big question (Score:3, Interesting)
The big question is if Oracle will keep being Oracle. This company has swallowed something bigger than him. Oracle might be more firmly sat on top of a revenue generator product, but Sun is a much larger operation, involving a dektop presence pretention, mobile, high end hardware design, high end software (Solaris), etc. (That's a reason IBM was a less conflicting buyer for Sun). In turn, Oracle sells a databse, and some enterprise programming tools, they have a much narrower scope (even the name implies this focus).
Perhaps, Oracle should rename themselves to Sun, and just sell a database called Oracle. =)
Re:The big question (Score:5, Informative)
Oracle is much larger than Sun in virtually every way, and is much more than just a database company. Anyone who thinks Oracle is only about databases hasn't done their homework.
Furthermore, Oracle buying Sun makes much more sense than IBM buying Sun. Oracle wants to offer the full package to their customers--from servers and storage, to middleware and database software. IBM already has most (if not all) of those bases covered, so their would have been a significant amount of overlap. The parts of Sun that survive the acquisition will turn Oracle into a force to be reckoned with, for better or worse.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Oracle will not likely make MySQL more like Oracle or make an easy migration path up to Oracle from MySQL since doing so will also create a migration path down from Oracle.
As for the MSAD/MSSQL, Sun just announced expanded interoperability between MySQL and Sun Identity Management Suite [tmcnet.com] which I believe works well with MS Active Directory.
I don't know much about it but your comment brought to mind the article I saw earlier today.
Re:Plug the damn leaks already (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't see it that way. The main benefit of adding a "MySQL" mode to Oracle is because MySQL's datatypes are non-standard and applications are likely to contain MySQL-specific DB portability bugs.
Nobody's going to buy Oracle and then start coding MySQLisms. If someone wants DB-portability, the techniques are already well known.
Re:Plug the damn leaks already (Score:5, Insightful)
Phillips said MySQL has reach in "incremental markets" such as start-ups that Oracle can't get to on its own.
Basically, there is a customer out there that won't buy your product because it's too expensive for example. Instead of losing them to a competitor, you get them to use another product of yours, for free or hopefully with a service contract. Either way, they haven't gone to a competitor.
Your not making the money you would have made had you sold your flagship product, but you weren't going to make that anyway. Might as well get something, with the potential for more later, than turn them away.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think they bough Sun for MySQL. If I had to guess, they don't even _care_ they got MySQL with it. They have dinky versions of Oracle for developers and stuff anyway.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought that most commercial MySQL installs used InnoDB (owned by Oracle) as the back-end anyhow. Does owning the free front end wrapper to InnoDB change anything?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
MySQL and Oracle (the database, not the company) aren't competitors. MySQL serves people who want cheap / free systems that are fast enough, but fairly simple. Oracle serves people who need real heavy-hitting solutions. What Oracle should be doing is using MySQL to keep customers away from PostgreSQL which also has the cheapness of MySQL but can meet a lot more (though not all) of Oracle's greater sophistication than MySQL.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Okay, I'll agree that excessive breeding is bad, but I don't see how it's fair to punish someone for having one or two (one for each partner) kids. In a way they are providing society with citizens to work as they retire. There is some leeway for having a child at different age groups. Better incentives for waiting until thirty, might cover quite a bit of losses with regards to someone who has a child at 16 and lives to 99. The comparison is having a child at 30 and living to 99, the child being better equi
Re:Sun Directory, Messaging Server, OpenSSO, etc. (Score:5, Interesting)