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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!
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
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
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.
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%. :)
Best thing Sun ever did, and they killed it rather than letting it grow.
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'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.
VirtualBox is one of the best free (and open-source) virtualization app, but they already have Oracle VM that is based on Xen. That turns VirtualBox in another product wich fate we don't know...