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Oracle Top Execs Answer Sun Employee Questions
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."
...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!
mySQL == OracleLite ? people will get fed up with it and want the 'real' version?
What about these?
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).
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.
Dual Opteron < $600
In the case of Sun, you have a company that makes (some) useful and reliable products. In the case of peoplesoft, you have a company that makes an obscenely bloated, broken, overpriced software package that has caused havoc and pain across the continent. Peoplesoft was the most similar thing to Microsoft available for takeover for less money than the contents of Fort Knox, and Sun did to them what so many of us would love to do to Microsoft.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Not sure how this got modded 'Offtopic', it seems completely on topic. Why does Oracle "need" mySQL, anyway?
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...
Light the blue touch-paper and retire immediately.
No company is stupid enough to encumber their products with the viral GPL anymore. The GNU crazies did a good job of marketing their kooky license as the default choice but companies have long since caught on and now stick to the free and developer friendly BSD/Apache open source licenses.
Android, Clang/LLVM, OS X's Darwin, etc are driving the Bearded GNU freaks crazy.
Love it!
"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.
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.
Dual Opteron < $600
That's one tactic I hope field sales reps don't use. MySQL and Oracle have different strengths. Oracle should just kill Lite/Express/whatever. Then first sell Oracle. If customer balk at the price convince them to use MySQL. Oracle should use MySQL to keep customers who may want to move away from Oracle Enterprise because of cost.
I find it odd that no one asked any questions about the future of Solaris - although there was a round-about question on x86 which resulted in an somewhat positive answer for SPARC. Oracle seems to be keeping SPARC and thus Solaris alive. (There isn't another OS running SPARC that is in widespread use after all.) This also makes me wonder if Oracle product support for Solaris x86 is going to improve now. This also seems to suggest that Oracle may not be selling Sun's hardware business to HP per the original plan. The idea sounded very interesting - HP would then become the most diversified hardware company selling x86, Itanium and SPARC hardware.
I wonder if this Oracle dude has ever heard of open source or gpl. He will have an awful hard time with trying to make java, mysql, open office or sun java application server closed source. If he tries, we'll just say "fork you"!
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
and a link to Oracle's "Free and Open Source Software" http://oss.oracle.com/
looks extensive
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 still-unreleased-but-nearly-finished GNU/BSD, and that's been as close to my dream system as anyone's come up with for quite some time.
The flip side argument, though, is: who cares if it's "cannibalized" for something else, e.g. Linux. It's still there, right? Just like the BSDers point out that proprietary derivatives of their software don't affect them at all, since the free versions are still there, unchanged. Anyway, porting kernel code between Solaris and Linux, like porting between BSD and Linux, isn't going to be that easy in the first place; license incompatibility will mostly mean that the final 10% of whatever component you might have in mind (ZFS is probably a good example) will have to be rewritten, and not just the first 90%. :)
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.
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
Amusing request to make to Oracle...
"Plug the damn leaks already"
You mean like Larry being on the board of directors of Apple and leaking information on the "Star Trek" project, causing him to get kicked off the Apple board?
-AC
The Income tax is a huge lever for government control. Want more of a thing, give a tax deduction (like the deduction for kids or mortgage payments). Want less? tax it.
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.
Sun Employees: What is our status when Oracle takes over?
Oracle President: See Figure 1
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Best thing Sun ever did, and they killed it rather than letting it grow.
your ternary operator has a syntax error.
THL phish sticks
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.
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?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I don't think that is exactly what they are thinking, but they could help MySQL become more Oracle compatible (e.g. support some of the same views, SQL datatypes, etc...). Secondly, there are a lot of mid-sized shops (I've been at several) who are total Microsoft shops, because it plays nice with Active Directory, is cheaper than Oracle and is reasonably manufacturer supported. However, if you have MySQL with major-vendor backing/support available at little-no cost, it might get more middle-managers willing to use it for more and more applications; which is what many developers/technicians are asking them to do, because they embrace OSS, often use it in their personal/side-gig work, and to save money to sure up the budget.
There is a lot of business out there that if you called it Oracle MySQL instead of MySQL, with not so much as one line changed, would be more apt to use it.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
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 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.
Dual Opteron < $600
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.
Pl/Sql.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm literally hating myself, for having refused a job offer by Sun 1 year and half ago, because of personal (but not very serious) reasons...Now I'll never have the opportunity to work in a company so academic and transparent...
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.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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.
I'm sure many don't consider VirtualBox as a professional product, but what will oracle do with it? I have read no mention of what fate VirtualBox has under oracle (3 weeks ago, IBM).
I personally love using VirtualBox since its free and simple to use. Will it be getting the axe?
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.
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. =)
"Basically, there is a customer out there that won't buy your product because it's too expensive"
Too expensive? The Oracle products that play in the same league than MySQL cost zero. You can't get it cheaper than this!
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.
because it's too expensive for example
You left out to "for example" part.
No mention of what happens to the Sun logo? That was the best part of Sun goddammit.