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."
Solaris (Score:5, Interesting)
I have been making a killing doing Solaris to Linux migrations since the Sun purchase. My wallet cannot thank Oracle enough.
Documentation died with Sun (Score:5, Interesting)
I noticed today that there's a shedload of bad links left in google's cache.
try searching for just about anything to do with solaris and you get links to sun pages that now just redirect you to oracle's completely useless "Oracle Documentation" page which seems to be almost entirely about the database.
virtualbox seems to be able the only software now owned by oracle that it doesn't seem intent on killing off.
They've done a good job ticking off the FLOSS guys (Score:3, Interesting)
Around with no customers... (Score:5, Interesting)
I work at a university which has historically been a huge Solaris shop as far as infrastructure goes. Hundreds of web servers, mail systems, LDAP servers, etc. have all been based on Solaris for many years. But Oracle has started trying to nickle & dime us to death, so with a new push to virtualize as much of our infrastructure as we can we're also migrating as much as we can off of Solaris and onto linux. We feel like Oracle is giving us very little alternative given how much more expensive they're making things. They may keep Sun/Solaris around for a long time but from here it looks like they may not have many customers actually using it...
FLOSS guys weren't contributing to OpenSolaris (Score:3, Interesting)
They may be hated at places like Slashdot but they have contributed far more to the kernel than Canonical.
Wish Sun had been bought by Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple has no significant enterprise division, and Sun was almost 100% enterprise. Apple could have merged its own chip fabrication division with Sun's, and picked up significant engineering talent along with it. Apple would control Java, which would have put it in just as strong of a position against Google as Oracle now has, which would have made sense strategically, as far as I can see.
Sure, there would have been some Java vs. Objective C questions, as well as Mac OS X Server vs. Solaris, but I think overall it would have been a healthier relationship for everyone than Oracle's purchase. Oh well, what do I know. I'm not a billionaire CEO.
But it is profitable. (Score:3, Interesting)
For obvious reasons I need to be AC, but while there are lots of comments above from people saying that they're turning away from Sun hardware and Solaris for any one of a number of reasons, the section of the company that is responsible for the hardware and Solaris is now profitable. It's actually doing better for Oracle than it was for Sun.. So whilst there may be scores of people here saying they're changing to Linux, etc, the obvious conclusion is that the people who are shunning Oracle were never actually profitable customers for Sun to have had. Oracle's customer base is significantly more than twice the size of Sun's and it would be a foolish person to bet that there won't be some amount of drag-along for sales from Oracle.
So, no, Oracle isn't trying to piss off Sun customers, they're trying to make sure that in the business agreements that they have, that they make money out of them.
Oracle is a company that makes money. It doesn't give much, if anything away for free. Sun was a company that did give away stuff for free and ultimately it failed. Larry Ellison is a smart business man, I'm pretty sure that their number crunching would have factored in customers dropping off.