Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.
With PostgreSQL you can write stored procedures in different languages, and they will run as fast as if the function was run from a shell script.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/interactive/xplang.html -- There's more info
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
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.
Best "String" Ever!
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.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
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.
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.
-William Brendel