Oracle's Open Source Identity Reborn At ForgeRock 76
darthcamaro writes "Oracle trashed a lot of former Sun technologies — not the least of which is Sun's open source identity platform which included OpenSSO and OpenDS. Now open source startup ForgeRock has taken those castoffs and created a business that has been running successfully for year. 'My personal goal here is to prove that you can have an open source business that is profitable,' said Simon Phipps, former chief open source officer at Sun and now chief strategy officer at ForgeRock. 'Having principles and having profit are not mutually exclusive.'"
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Are they encased in red wax?
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It probably means they haven't burned through their VC funding yet. Give it time.
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It means they have a CEO, CSO (S = Strategy) and 5 vice presidents. (Do they even have employees that write code?).
I think it means they used up their VC cash and are desperate for Oracle to buy them out.
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Without actually reading TFA, it could be "for a year" or "for years". Such "minor" mistakes only serve to increase ambiguity and make it harder to get at the actual meaning behind the words.
Plus, you'd think it'd be embarrassing by now to have that kind of sloppiness on the Slashdot front page.
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> you'd think it'd be embarrassing by now to have that kind of sloppiness on the Slashdot front page.
Ha! Gotcha!
Ok, it was an in-joke that you couldn't have spotted. Slashdot pay someone to add minor sloppiness just to wind you up. Your comments give them a much needed laugh on a slow Saturday.
No profitable open source businesses? (Score:2, Insightful)
So he hasn't heard of Red Hat then?
Another life-after-Oracle story: (Score:5, Informative)
http://openwonderland.org/ [openwonderland.org] is about to celebrate their first post-fork anniversary
those who have (Score:2)
"'Having principles and having profit are not mutually exclusive.'""
Principal profits is exclusively for those who have.
Sounds more like (Score:2)
Oracle's porn name?
To be fair (Score:1)
Oracle does suck.
The only people who don't think so are the people in charge of Oracle.
Nobody likes doing business with Oracle; rational people consider it a necessary evil, like taking a dump after a big meal.
Chief Solitaire Officer (Score:1)
"chief open source officer", "chief strategy officer"
Huh? Is this what you call someone who sits around all day at a computer, playing solitaire?
Re:Chief Solitaire Officer (Score:5, Funny)
Sun's identity platform (Score:5, Insightful)
Oracle trashed a lot of former Sun technologies â" not the least of which is Sun's open source identity platform which included OpenSSO and OpenDS.
Uh.. I don't get it. Oracle still sells these, the DS anyway, maybe Sun's SSO was tossed, but Oracle had their own identity platform too. It's surprising enough that Sun's DS is still available and prominently listed.
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/id-mgmt/overview/index-085178.html?ssSourceSiteId=ocomen [oracle.com]
And, the corresponding open source projects are still here http://www.opends.org/ [opends.org] and here http://java.net/projects/opensso [java.net]
Is this a silly way to say Oracle is not commercializing Sun's open source versions of the projects Oracle _owns_ and is selling? Isn't that kind of good for open source? I would think more distance between Oracle and OpenDS/OpenSSO would be a GOOD thing for the health of the open source projects?
Oh.. this is a slashvertisement, shit, and I fell for it.
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Well, it might be a slashvertisement, but I was able to learn about a tech stack which might come in handy. Also, is it only a slashvertisement when someone writes an article about a small company vs. a large corp?
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If you actually try buying some of that stuff you will quickly find that Oracle has not got the faintest idea about how they are supposed to support Sun hardware, much less the heavier enterprise portfolios. They are all there in the price lists, but there are absolutely nobody around who can help with issues.
Re:Sun's identity platform (Score:4, Insightful)
+1
Oracle haven't a goddamn clue what to do with the business they bought.
I have nine years' Solaris on my resume. I advised my boss and boss's boss to move us from Solaris to Linux as soon as Oracle bought them. Even paying Red Hat, at least they'll do more with our money than snort it on Larry Ellison's yacht. Even running the Oracle database, we'll run it on Linux. Solaris has no future, only a slowly dwindling present.
Your SPARC hardware is now decorative relics. Well, it was already. But Solaris on Dell runs fantastically well ... until Oracle started charging £300 for the privilege of doing so for a year. HAVE YOU HEARD OF LINUX? I HEAR IT'S QUITE A POPULAR x86 UNIX-LIKE.
They can't even patent-troll the sort of victim who'll roll over. No, they had to start on Google. Good Lord.
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The went after Google only because Oracle really has no mobile strategy (which should be considered serious gap by their shareholders). Somebody over there in Oracle-land figured that they could get a few bucks from Google, and a percentage of Android revenue if they went after them.
I suspect it will be much harder than they think.
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That's pretty typical of Oracle's acquisitions, not so?
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I think many Sun people leaving certainly didn't help here. Over time this will be resolved though.
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My reading of the article was that they didn't feel Oracle was resourcing the projects appropriately so they took the ball to start their own game, so to speak. I take it the products in TFA are competitors to Microsoft's Active Directory and Oracle's own SSO system (but more distributed since they seem to be incorporating OAuth).
Re:Sun's identity platform (Score:4, Informative)
As the Oracle director responsible for all of Oracle's directory services technology (including OpenDS) and a long-time open source proponent (Google my name), I'd like to take particular issue with this article's assertions related to OpenDS.
Oracle has absolutely not "trashed" OpenDS technology. There have been significant commits to the open source repository since the acquisition. While we don't sell "express" builds, we are absolutely committed to commercializing much of this technology in other forms along-side Oracle's directory virtualization, synchronization, and management technologies.
The fact of the matter is that the bulk of the commits to this code base have been and continue to be made by people that remain employed by Oracle. Copying a source repository and doing a bulk rename (i.e. forking the code) is hardly something to celebrate. I am certainly disappointed at the level of FUD being directed at the OpenDS project and the engineers that continue to work so hard to take it to the next level.
Clayton Donley, Sr. Director, Development
Oracle Identity Management
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You were doing so well and then you had to type "take it to the next level" :-(
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You're ex-Sun? For God's sake, get out while you still can.
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Oracle has trashed OpenSSO though, which was a pity.
I'm glad ForgeRock picked up the pieces, I guess Oracle was afraid it might cut into their "enterprise" IM business.
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Clayton Donley, Sr. Director, Development
Oracle Identity Management
Hmm, Well, of course an identity manager would attempt to manage Oracle's identity by posting something like the above.
So long as you're not astroturfing for Microsoft, we'll allow it.
Blowing Smoke? (Score:1)
Far be it for anyone to question you, Mr Sr. Director, but one of the advantages of this open source stuff is that people can fact-check you pretty easily. So I did.
The OpenDS change log is at http://java.net/projects/opends/sources/svn/history?page=1&theme=java.net [java.net] and while there have indeed been a bunch of updates made, they all seemed to dry up about two months ago (apart from a lone update made this week).
The OpenDJ change log is at http://sources.forgerock.org/changelog/opendj/ [forgerock.org] and it seems to
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If you had taken a little more time to do some research you would have found that the Sun DS product you linked to (now called Oracle DS EE) is a rebranding of the Sun DS 7.0. This is not OpenDS. OpenDS was slated to be the next generation replacement for the Sun DS . While OpenDS has not been officially canned, the project has had significant setbacks with developers leaving or being let go and commits to it have slowed down considerably since Oracle took over.
And same thing with OpenSSO. Had you done
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My employer bought a license for a Sun product that was dumped in favor of the Oracle version (Java CAPS). JCAPS is barely on life support @ Oracle -- they're committed to bug fixes and that's it. There will be no additional features, and the really cool stuff, like Fuji, that was promised "real soon now" is gone along with the talent that worked on it. As a result, we've foregone support and saved about $30k/year.
On the other hand, ForgeRock has taken the core of JCAPS (OpenESB) and is working on delive
Licensing Open Source (Score:1)
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The Free in FOSS refers to freedom, not cost. Many companies charge for services, so your ideas are not new.
Then shouldn't it be called LOSS?
I'm just sayin' ... Libre is more accurate than Free, and LOSS is far more accurate than FOSS
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Besides, unambiguous words like "unencumbered" and "liberated" already exist in English, so importing "libre" is unnecessary.
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Attrocious pun aside, by that logic it should be called "Software Libre", to follow Spanish grammar rules rather than those of English, given that "libre" isn't an english word to begin with.
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Libre is also French.
Freedom is not Gratisdom.
Rhymes with hilarious. (Score:4, Interesting)
Solarryus.
If Larry is in to profit he is in for it all; any kindness would result in less profit.
Look at it this way, Ponytail went too far in open sourcing everything he could, he literally slashed Sun's throat, Oracle has participated in open source
previous to the Sun acquisition and I suspect will continue to do so; what they will not do is lift their britches for free.
I don't like where the support model is head for Solaris, someone got the idea that 20% of their customer base resulted in 80% of their profit, this equation often
holds true, if you cut the 80 percent that is left and look at the 20% as 100% you'll be able to once more say 80% of my profit comes from 20% of my customers.
Either way I see a lot of the whining coming out of the Sun acquisition coming from the very same people who put Sun in a position to be acquired.
As someone who has made a fairly good career out of supporting Solaris I believe what Larry is doing will at the very least keep Solaris around for a while longer
and that suits me just fine.
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Yes it LITERALLY rains cats and dogs, doesn't it do that on your planet, I suppose if you tossed some off the roof it would, I hear it rained blackbirds in Arkansas, maybe the cats chase the birds and in turn the dogs chase them?
Red Hat does seem to be doing well enough, they built their business from day one on open source, its not easy to do but you can profit while open, what is not
easy to do is take a commercial entity that has grown fat and inefficient running on a closed model, snap your fingers and s
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I think this applies http://xkcd.com/725/ [xkcd.com]
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"Ponytail went too far in open sourcing everything he could, he literally slashed Sun's throat"
Sun was already fucked before Schwartz. He went hell for open source as a last ditch Hail Mary pass.
I just so, so wish they'd gone with IBM not Oracle. I'd still be able to do Solaris for a living.
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" I believe what Larry is doing will at the very least keep Solaris around for a while longer
and that suits me just fine."
Solaris rapidly appears to be headed towards IBM Mainframe-land. The cost of business for companies who cannot easily switch away.
As long as you're within 5-10 years of retirement, I think your strategy is sound, as long as you don't mind moving around the country.
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Worst Sun product ever in the universe:
Sun One web server. Formerly (a long time ago) Netscape Server.
Good Lord, if ever a product deserved brutal murder ... but that thing can't die.
I leave it off my resume. I even still have ClearCase there and I leave Sun One web server off.
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I believe all traces of iPlanet/SunOne were exorcised when Glassfish junked the last native parts when going from version 2.x to 3.x
OpenAM (OpenSSO) still calls its cookie iPlanetDirectoryPro though...
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DS as in Directory Server. Your nerd-fu is weak, you play too many games.
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with those credentials... (Score:2)
Sun's business was built on taking BSD UNIX and making it proprietary, then degrading it further and further. Later, they lied about Java and open source, laying the groundwork for Oracle's lawsuits.
With that history and those credentials, why would I ever trust the man responsible for open source at Sun?
Darkstar (Score:1)
The Darkstar fork is also still very active:
http://www.reddwarfserver.org/ [reddwarfserver.org]