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Slow Oracle Merger Leads To Outflow of Sun Projects, Coders
An anonymous reader writes "Sun Microsystems might have had a chance if the Oracle merger had gone through quickly, but between the DoJ taking its time and the European Commission, which seems to get off on abusing American firms, just plain dragging its feet, that won't happen now. As Sun twists in the wind, unable to defend itself, and Oracle is unable to do anything until the deal closes, IBM is pretty much tearing Sun to shreds. By the time this deal closes, there won't be much left for Oracle. This is not how a Silicon Valley legend should end."
Sorry, but it really does seem to get off on abusing American firms.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Kind of like how the USA seems to "get off" on taking down middle eastern fundamentalists and strong men.
Stupid article - so three coders (JRuby team) quit, and Sun's losing in sales to IBM (which they were doing anyway before the merger).
It's their own fault for trying to do business over there.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Sun has been irrelevant... oh since the .com crash.
When a company is taken over, the corporate "feel" usually suffers. I have seen a few companies that were taken over from the inside (I experienced the take-over itself in one occasion), and the employers were never happy with it. And as always, the best people have the best chances, so they leave first...
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
This is not how a Silicon Valley legend should end.
How should they end?
Spectacular bankruptcy like Enron?
Seems like most in silicon valley do a slow fade into oblivion and are eventually acquired for peanuts and never heard from again. 3DO, Transmeta, Borland, Quarterdeck, SGI, etc...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The summary places a lot of blame on regulators. But in fact, the article quotes IBM claiming the announcement of the acquisition is what drove people to IBM; that obviously has nothing to do with subsequent delays. As for talent leaving, the article provides one example of 3 employees who left because they were unsure of Oracle's commitment to their work. However, there is no reason to assume the EU or DOJ have anything to do with this. Oracle could have reassured them at any time, if they knew, and cared, which isn't a very realistic expectation for a small team in a big merger. What is motivating the story submitter to put so much unwarranted blame at the feet of the EU and DOJ?
Evidence in the form of the number of actions taken against American firms, as opposed to actions taken against European firms would really help make your case. For bonus points, show that American firms don't actually deserve the 'abuse' by committing more crimes than their European counterparts. Without some sort of evidence, your post is simply pro-American, anti-European jingoism. Probably boiling down to either 'Capitalism GOOD, socialism BAD!' or simple flag waving nationalism, rather than any kind of logical thought process.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
This is not how a Silicon Valley legend should end.
Why not? How, exactly, should a Silicon Valley legend end, like Enron did? Nothing lasts forever.
Free Martian Whores!
There seem to be two points in the article and summary. The one that makes sense is that the slowness of the merger is murdering Sun's business. The other is that the slowness is causing people to leave. I doubt the latter is true. People do not want to work for Oracle, fast merge or slow merge.
Hopefully more projects and coders will leave Sun before they get absorbed into Oracle, the industry's largest pool of promising, stagnating technology.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Both dTrace and ZFS represent substantial contributions to the state of the art in the operating system world.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
In a cathartic orgy of violence in the third act, in which everyone dies except the narrator, who is finally revealed to be an obscure character who was shown briefly in the second episode and everyone forgot about in the meantime.
Oh, sorry, I was reading TVTropes.
So IBM first tried to buy SUN, but then realizes that SUN is losing business anyway and gives up on the offer. This further screws SUN up. SUN stocks fell 22% that day on news of the failed takeover. Now, because of the delay in the Oracle acquisition, IBM is trying to make hay in the sun (pun not intended) by going after as many SUN customers as possible. This is just a ruthless business strategy by IBM. Instead of buying a troubled company and getting their customers, they waited to make their situation worse and then started luring clients away and all this with no money down. Bravo!!
If the EU is actually delaying anything over this, then they're either doing it for political reasons or out of incredible incompetence. MySQL is open source and has already been forked. So what if Oracle gets ahold of the IP behind MySQL?! They cannot close source MariaDB, Drizzle, etc.
Oracle predicted that the sun will shine on. Maybe the oracle is a quack.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
While I agree that a dragging take-over procedure can be very bad as well, I merely wanted to say that there are more factors that make a take-over unsuccessful. I have been in two companies that bled completely dry in a few months because of a takeover.
In one company, even upper management was not involved in the sale and learned only afterwards from it. The owner had done it completely by surprise.
In another company, the new owner was a competitor that merely wanted to get rid of a competing firm. We called our company "The Big Brother House". because every week somebody was leaving.
I worked (as a temp) at Fokker when the announcement was made that it would be sold to DASA and I cannot say I saw even one happy reaction. My contract ended before the take-over really took place though.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
I'm just a little confused. How can the European Commission block the merger of two US firms? I can see why the FTC would be an issue, but once the US regulators are happy, how does the EC have *any say* in this at all? This seems like a really screwy thing - what's next - for any two companies to merge, they need the permission of EVERY COUNTRY ON EARTH?
I suppose, what it comes down to is, those two need EC permission to have offices/do business in the EU, right? The way I see it, if this article is right about the delays hurting them that much, just finish the merger when they get US permisssion, and sort out with the Europeans later. EC can't really block the merger of two US companies in the US, and if they want to block them doing business in the EU, even though that would be a huge problem, that's got to be less of a problem than losing all the company's technical talent, right?
Better to ask forgiveness than permission, I think, is the expression.
My two cents: It doesn't suck to work at Oracle. Pay is fair and above market, benefits are good, employees are treated fairly, and there are a lot of exciting projects going on to choose from as a techie. If you don't like what you're doing for a living, there are numerous opportunities always available in something more suited to your interest, and telecommuting is encouraged in most "talent" positions, so relocation is largely a non-issue. The employees I work with (admittedly, we're a rack-monkey and operating system nerd crowd) are generally optimistic and excited about the merger.
Yes, as part of the M&A process there have been layoffs from time to time. With the exception of hostile takeovers, they are fairly predictable in advance, severance is decent and fair, the door remains open if you decide to rejoin the company later, and as far as a huge Fortune 500 company goes, it's a really decent place to work. If you work in some of the larger locations there are nice benefits on-site for free or at really reduced prices (gyms, cafeterias, massages, to name a few), and there is a lot of employment flexibility.
Of course there are annoyances like paperwork, lengthy project approval processes, ITIL compliance, SOX compliance, and so forth. Welcome to working for any large company. But to say "People do not want to work for Oracle, fast merge or slow merge" is simply false. By and large, it's a good company to work for, and the low turnover rate and lengthy average employment time amongst extremely talented and well-educated people speaks to overall job satisfaction.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
If all of Sun's JRuby developers left to work for Engine Yard, what possible impact might this have on the JRuby project? Will Sun continue to support JRuby development? Does this decrease the chances of Ruby someday becoming a mainstream part of Java?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I sold my Sun workstation on CraigsList before this news hit
Die, (Open)Solaris, Die!
"This is not how a Silicon Valley legend should end."
I don't know about that...
http://astronomyonline.org/Stars/Images/MassiveStarLifecycle.gif
The only difference here is Sun is now orbiting another star called Oracle which should make things interesting.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
"Silicon Valley legend"? Sun made it's fortune by taking BSD Unix and commercializing it, selling it pre-installed on boxes. Sure, most of the enhancements made to PCs over the years appeared years earlier on Sun workstations (e.g. CD-ROM drives, sound cards, and Ethernet), but ever since the rise of Linux as a viable alternative to Unix, Sun has been floundering about looking for a viable business model. Spark CPUs? Give me a break; no matter how good the initial design was, if you don't have the several billion dollars a year Intel is putting into R&D to improve the chips, you're fighting a losing battle. Java? Great idea, but you give it away for free, and never have figured out how to make money off of it. Now they can't compete in hardware with off-the-shelf X86 boxes, and they can't compete in software with Linux (being supported by their rival IBM). In short, they have no real business model and no real reason to continue existence. Oracle is doing them a favor by offering to buy them out. Oracle has been trying for years to sell a database appliance with Oracle preinstalled, but they keep running up against that "can't compete with off-the-shelf X86 boxes" barrier too. Sure, Sun invokes fond nostalgia for many, many Unix nerds, but face it -- it's dead, Jim.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I don't know why big companies keep merging despite the fact that tech mergers rarely seem to be worth it. Is it short-sided greed and ego that keeps driving mergers? Hit-and-run lawyers? Why don't they learn that it's too likely to flop? I don't get it.
Table-ized A.I.
Quoted from the article...
"ISVs were more than willing to work with Sun because they saw Sun as a neutral hardware platform," he said. "But when the Sun platform becomes part of Oracle, and Oracle has a reputation for acquiring companies and replacing the products with Oracle products, then ISVs get nervous. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out."
Ah yes... Oracle has a pretty good reputation of replacing its acquired products... But what is worse (and I have first hand experience as one of those ISVs), is that Oracle likes to leave these acquired products in limbo until the replacements are ready... Support on the old product is virtually non-existent, and migration to the new product (when it actually does come) is like a shot in the dark; then can never give you reliable documentation on how to make the transition and Oracle engineers always insist that it is far easier than it actually is.
I can understand why people would run from Sun products. This is Oracle's first acquisition outside of a software-only company. If a company has to depend on Sun fulfilling their provisioning and support contracts, Oracle's reputation would probably scare away customers that are concerned with potential supplier problems.
Clients are just betting based upon Oracle's reputation with respect to their acquisitions...
JRuby fate was already discussed on slashdot and there is nothing new on IBM program. Every vendor has these, every vendor offer iniciatives toward purchasing his wares.
OTOH, if IBM really offering 64k$ for single-socket CMT server, then it can be really good purchase for customer, considered that Sun T1000 (1st generation niagara) cost less than $5000.
So :)
1. Buy one Sun T1000 for $5k
2. Get 64k$ from IBM
3. ???
4. 59 thousand dollars profit
Oh, and Sun server outperforms IBM Power
Three ex-sun developers didn't have Oracle kiss their rears and so they left and tried to get a little hype for themselves by saying their former masters are dying. Regardless of whether or not its true, the whole way they tried to get some press is pathetic. If they want to make news, make a product release with cool features.
This is my sig.
Spark CPUs
Hey Sun Expert! Sparc is spelled with a C, not a K
Just, uh, throwing that out there.
This is my sig.
I really think it's Capitalism at its best! If Sun had been minding the business store and its marketing plan had been sucessful it would not be being eaten by wolves today. It's not reasonable to blame the EU or IBM either. The EU is looking out for itself (and European citizenry), and IBM is doing its job by killing off the competition.
Oracle shouldn't be able to merge with Sun for antitrust reasons. Sun's disintegration opens up room for new players in the marketplace. What exactly do you free-market capitalists have a problem with?
"This is not how a Silicon Valley legend should end"
It's almost fitting considering how some of Sun's best customers were left out in the cold with bad CPUs and RAM, while Sun lawyers (waving signed NDAs in hand) were more prevelent than Sun Support engineers. Remember all the press about that? What, you don't? It's because it was silenced by Sun.
Let us look back on a long and storied history of World Geopolitcal, Economic and Military abuses ?? Hmmm the US is 200+ years old and has a decent history of such, however let us examine Spainish, English, or German history and compare the length and breadth of their abuses. There is NO ROOM on either side for stone throwing, that is what governments do, LEVERAGE their power while they have it to try and establish the highest standard of living and profit for their citizens. The thought that scares me the most is when the EU and the US STOP fighting and decide that cooperation allows them MORE POWER and control.
We all need to get off the horse, and out of the way of the runaway carriage...
posting anon to preserve mod's
The problem I have with it is that the Sun shareholders own something of value - namely the brands, technology, and organizational structure (that is, they don't own the employees of course, but the do 'own' existing business relationships with those employees which could be transferred, and those relationships have value). Even if the company is not worth what it once was, shouldn't the shareholders have the freedom to sell off the assets of value which they own to an interested buyer?
Capitalism is, first and foremost, about freedom - that people should have the freedom to do business without undo interference by the government. The great economic tragedy of the current political climate is that all the people who are hating on capitalism right now forget that the *reason* the USA has traditionally chosen a mostly capitalist economy (I say mostly because, it definitely hasn't been a 'pure' capitalist business system in a long time) is because that is the most Free system of business.
There must be a very compelling reason, indeed, to impinge on the freedom of others. Sun shareholders should have the right to sell what is left of the company to a willing buyer.
Well, the prospect of one mega software company controlling both commercial and open source database software seems like a valid concern.
The EU commission is only trying to protect the EU's interests... That's what it's there for, right? Nobody on /. seems to mind when they take Microsoft to task. I wouldn't expect a European company to be able to take advantage of their position in the U.S. without due process, so why the fuck should we put up with the same. Xenophobia at the geek level? Now that is news for nerds... Submission has elements of troll in it. Mod submission down..
College-Pages.com - Online Colleges, Degrees, and Programs
As much as anyone else, I want(ed) Sun to succeed. It's an engineer's company.
But fact is they signed their own warrant. They made a catastrophic failure of monetising java (despite all the mobile rhetoric). Reality is there wouldn't /be/ an enterprise java market had the likes of IBM not figured out how to sell stuff to big companies.
Sun hasn't successfully executed anything for too long. It put all its eggs in the java basket. It even gave the top gig to the man who oversaw its inability to make software a commercial viability.
I'd love to see Sun return to the successful, engineer's company it once was. Just ain't gonna happen. How should it die? With the good engineers (and there's _LOTS_ of them) whisked off to success elsewhere. And Shwartz given a paintbrush and told to learn his trade form the bottom up.
For all us old Berkeley types who put "/usr/ucb" first in the path it would.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Too bad I just ran out of mod points. I'd have an offtopic for you and your friend who'd rather sit around in your respective moms' basements instead of going to work.
"Why do so many of my fellow Americans have trouble understanding this? Are you dense? Governments do this sort of thing. They actually want to have a say about what gets sold in their countries and by whom."
Yes, yes, that's all fine and good. However, seems to me that something like a merger of two foreign companies who both happen to do business in your country is rather a bit out of the purview of *another* country's authority.
"since you have no voice in any government but that of the US."
And why should any country's leaders feel they have the right to interfere in the U.S.? What I mean is, if Oracle or Sun got permission previously to do business in European countries, then after a merger, they should at least have a right to continue doing the same business as before. Now, granted, if they wish to *modify* their business in those foreign countries (for example, discontinue a product which has become redundant, or introduce new products they weren't selling in that country before), I certainly see the validity of that country reviewing the changes of *business* they wish to do, but not changes of *ownership*.
I'm sorry, but I just do not see that it is anything less than a loss of sovereignty for the US, to expect that US business must get foreign approval for changes in ownership.
The commission doesn't seem to be concerned about the consequences of its actions, just the consequences of the merger. Since business thrives on stability, promoting instability is a powerful weapon in the marketplace, and they seem to be wielding it with abandon. It's like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle - government scrutiny changes the direction of a company.
MacroHard - Boning you in a big way! (TM)
is someone higher up at sun saw this coming early on, and decided to craft a poison-pill. I wont be surprised if down the road Oracle ends up stepping in a few more bear-traps left by spirited folk from the old guard (automatic stock spit, NCO contracts auto-nullifying, etc...)
Good people go to bed earlier.
Riiiiight. I'm off-topic. Okay then - read this:
This just in from MSNBC.com (1:06 p.m. ET, Thursday)
European Union regulators applied the brakes Thursday, launching a formal antitrust probe that shatters Oracle's goal of completing the acquisition this summer. The U.S. Department of Justice has already approved the deal.
Who here still thinks the European Commission is just a "neutral party" and not, to quote the summary, "seems to get off on abusing American firms"?
It seems odd how they are dragging their feet like this, especially after the U.S. DOJ already provided approval. We're just talking about the merger of two companies - why create an anti-monopoly investigation for that?
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Sun should end with Schwartz and McNealy making a bundle in cash from Oracle.... err... wait a minute... that's going to happen anyway!!
Nevermind...
..the European Commission, which seems to get off on abusing American firms...
Oh, horseshit. I've worked in American companies with European offices for years and have seen no such thing. Europeans are just as happy to take American dollars as anyone else. The EC countries do, however, have rather more stringent antitrust laws than the United States (and more consumer protections, more privacy laws, and so on). If you do business in a country, you have to respect their laws, just as European countries doing business in the US have to respect our laws (or our lawlessness in many matters). That Microsoft and Oracle -- two companies that are hardly well-loved here -- have had trouble in Europe hardly constitutes a pattern of "abusing American firms".
It may be that the real issue here is that Oracle, like Microsoft, gets off on anti-competitive practices, and as a result often finds itself up against laws against the same, in Europe as well as the US.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I was thinking anime until you said the narrator survives.
Remember when all the FOSSies cheered every time the EU unjustly strongarmed Microsoft for billions of dollars, and created an entire subset of laws which only apply to Microsoft?
Well, now Sun and Oracle are harvesting the bitter fruits of trying to beat Microsoft through legislation rather than the marketplace. In a way, it's poetic justice- after all, they were some of the biggest advocates of turning lawmakers into anti-MS attackdogs.
Those who ride a tiger fear to dismount... and it looks like Sun and Oracle are the tiger's new chew toys.
OK I know: "AC", but where are the mod points for truly informative posts?
This is an old, old story
Unix is snake oil, Ken Olsen
WNT is a completely new design, Dave Cutler
Linux is not ready for the Desktop or Enterprise, AC
Nothing can compete against FOSS done right, hopefully this will get OOO really into Open Source, and maybe someone at Oracle, whis is smart, Ellison, will realise they have to do an Exchange.Outlook and OpenSync job properly
All in all this is the very best outcome for FOSS.
So now the stupid overpaid worthless bureaucratic asslicks lolling around in their comfy EC jobs can fuck around with foreign companies to the point that the foreign companies are uncompetitive.
Nice work
the European Commission, which seems to get off on abusing American firms
As an European businessman I have to make a small correction: the European Commission seems to be against any firm, be it European, American or from Mars (I'm an European citizen, and my family's company literally paid millions of Euros in taxes that in the US don't even exist, while always being screwed by the EU "social market" system in more ways that it's worth mentioning here).
That's why my current start-up (Omlulu.com, a low-cost, no-DRM, no-BS video marketplace) is registered in the United States. Because EU is to business (and free competition) what Stalin was to democracy.
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
A year or so ago, Sun had enough FREE CASH ON HAND to take the company private. They chose not to do so. Instead, they talked at length about finding partners, synergy, etc. In other words, Jonathan Schwartz put out a big FOR SALE sign on the front lawn, and waited for people to come calling. When that didn't happen, they dropped their price (1:4 reverse split, which can't help but devalue a company) and cut staff some more.
There's nothing predatory about Oracle buying a company that was begging to be bought.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Reminds me a bit of how Atari faded into obvilion at the end.
Sun will be missed.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Idiot. You have the best democracy that bribes can buy, and you have the gaull to complain when we dont go along!
I read the 'tearing sun to shreds' article and it sure was exaggerated.
The article title is "Defections Batter Sun Micro.".....whatever. Three jruby developers left, and they didn't go to IBM.
Next the article talks about 170 sun customers going to IBM. And then mentions that none of Sun's big customers have switched to IBM. I wasn't able to find the total Sun customer count...but I'll take a guess and say that 170 is less than 1% of their total.
I know that Sungard.com's Luminis portal for higher ed is mostly installed on Solaris, and there are 75+ installations of that one application alone. One app (Luminis), for one business type (Edu), is nearly half of this "massive exodus" away from Sun.... give me a break hehe.
It is number one in the following way:
We spend the most per person for healthcare!
Undisputed kings of overspending, we're number one! we're number one! ;)
The New York Times says:
Another issue that may have led the Europeans to take more time over the case is the way that Oracle has handled regulators on both sides of the Atlantic.
Oracle notified E.U. regulators of its deal in late July, more than two months after it had informed U.S. officials.
European merger watchdogs can take a dim view if companies spread out their notifications between jurisdictions over long periods of time, and they have said in the past that such tactics might be designed to pressure the Europeans to give the green light to takeovers already approved in the United States.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/technology/companies/04oracle.html?_r=1&hp
SUN's problem was that they could not figure out What_to_Do, the reason for that was that the founders, Shah, Joy & Bechtalsheim all left and the stars of the second level of management were never sucessfully engaged, and the paren is exactly right, SUN, largely founded by those who jumped ship from DEC faithfully repeated DEC's most significant mistakes,
the Cult of the CEO, Olsen & McNealy
transfer control from Engineering to Marketing
getting into, and spending lots of money on, fights that are Just not Worth Winning, JAVA
SUN grew, and outpaced Apollo (domain) HP and the when HP bought Apollo's market share, both again.
But it did not take long for in-fighting and huberis to set in and bring SUN to where they are today,
so that Oracle is today's Compaq.
Oracle will kill both the SPARC and Java track as they exist today as neither can be monetized. It will be
very intersting if Java can succeeed on its merits, I hope not, Python is a far nicer language.
I can appreciate your perspective, but seems to me that AIX is ingrained in a lot of places for the foreseeable future. Remember when IBM pulled AIX c.2001 and replaced it with linux, and the admins in the trenches bitched and moaned?
One of the main problems with AIX is learning AIX.
Solaris was and is used in education institutions. You can download it for free (and even use it commercially without paying a dime--or go open=source with OpenSolaris). You can run it in VMware, Parallels, VirtualBox. There are many ways to learn in a hands-on fashion.
How the hell do you learn AIX except at an AIX shop? And how do you get into an AIX shop if you don't have experience?
IBM and AIX have no community engagement. It's all golf buddies and three martini lunches with expense accounts.
Its the end of another era. Back in the day the Sun Campus in Santa Clara, Ca. was teh $h!t. It was THE place to be for employment, demonstrations, lectures, all kinds of stuff. It was on the Sun campus that I was told "Learn Java, now." (Lots of good that did...) I myself have been there for a number of reasons, not only to get a job (which I didn't get). And all the geek employers near by. Back then, I remember that when Scott McNealy said something, Silicon Valley generally listened, so long as Bill Gates or Larry Ellison didn't currently have the spotlight. Sun, ye fallen, mightily.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
There are so many people working in the IT industry who are deficient in basic logic, it should scare you. We don't teach it in schools, it's little wonder so many people are so poor at it. We don't teach the basic logical reasoning fallacies, either. We are paying the price for this educational failure in so many ways.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I was horrified a few years ago to see a T-shirt featuring a cartoonish Yoda with the phrase mangled into something like, "Try not, there is only do."
Oracle could give Linux a nice run for the money, with the right OpenSolaris based strategy. They would need a healthy dose of clue, however, which I don't expect them to get from Sun.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
How is Sun "unable to defend itself"? The whole point of this story is that the merger hasn't happened. So Sun is just as able to defend itself as before the attempt at merging was announced.
Besides, Oracle and Sun's directors know that mergers like the one with Sun take a long time, and are not guaranteed to be allowed. So that risk had to have been taken with this scenario in the math. If that could possibly hurt Sun's business in the meantime, that's Sun's fault - and Oracle's problem. Because if the merger goes through, they'll have paid full price for a damaged Sun. And if the merger fails, Sun will have been damaged for no benefit at all to Sun's shareholders, which the next target of an Oracle acquisition will rightly fear, making Oracle less able to acquire companies, which it must do to survive.
In any case, this whole article is BS. The EU antitrust division is taking longer not just to "bash American companies". The EU is concerned that MySQL will stop being a viable choice once it's owned by Oracle. That MySQL's open source community will no longer thrive once it's controlled by Oracle's execs instead of Sun's. That's a valid concern - that Obama's government just ignored when it immediately OK'd the deal.
The corporate mass media will spin this story any way it can to help kill anything about Sun that promoted freedom, choice and innovation. It worships Oracle and Larry Ellison, even as they make it harder for anyone else to make money. The pure capitalist will sell the rope used to hang himself. And Oracle will charge for the transactions.
--
make install -not war
If you've been reading slashdot recently, maybe it should step into a closet and blow its head off with a shotgun.
and the European Commission, which seems to get off on abusing American firms
In what way is the European Commission "abusing American firms"? Seems to me they are doing exactly what a regulatory authority for a big market like the EU should do, and they are regulating European firms just as much as American firms.
The US is #37 based mostly on infant mortality, and to a smaller extent "cost equity". We suck at infant mortality statistics because we count all live births as live births, while Europeans only count "viable" births, with viable being defined in many different ways. So, your #37 statistic is bullshit. However, keep worshiping Obama the Savior!
If they didn't want to have to follow EU rules then they shouldn't have expanded operations into the EU, and instead elected to merely export products to EU companies.
They did whatever risk/benefit analysis they could, and given the conditions in europe (and frankly, european attitudes seem have been pretty consistent over the past few decades, so european activities should be no surprise to a well-researched company) they decided that the profit was greater to have operations in european countries, and therefore at least in part under european regulatory authority.
In other words, it's their own fault for trying to straddle countries and pick and choose operating styles which were convenient to only one venue (or worse, attempting to operate in some imagined conglomerate venue that favors the company)
They knew the rules going in, and either ignored them or chose to interpret them using definitions that were culturally incorrect.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Crimony, chill out buddy.
Speaking of "content-free". He did actually post one fact--not much, but more than all your posts put together.
Your posts are verbal diarrhea. All of them. You have said absolutely nothing substantive. I can't imagine why anyone is modding you up.
By the way, the article was not about the merits of various healthcare systems. It was about antitrust reviews of the Sun/Oracle merger. Granted, it did mention Europe. Apparently, mentioning Europe is all it takes to trigger this kind of reaction out of you...
Ever try to do GIS in a key-value store? Statistical analysis? Data mining? Billing?
Yes. My RDBMS data models tend to be so highly normalized that they move to be a series of key-value tables.
Moving to key-value data stores was no challenge at all for my data models. The challenges were in other places.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Something is rotten in (a certain region of) the state of California. :P
Sure, TVTropes can go head to head with Wikipedia in an addictive-reading competition, but Hamlet was the first thing to come to mind as I read the opening of your post.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Riiiiight. I'm off-topic. Okay then - read this:
This just in from MSNBC.com (1:06 p.m. ET, Thursday)
European Union regulators applied the brakes Thursday, launching a formal antitrust probe that shatters Oracle's goal of completing the acquisition this summer. The U.S. Department of Justice has already approved the deal.
Who here still thinks the European Commission is just a "neutral party" and not, to quote the summary, "seems to get off on abusing American firms"?
It seems odd how they are dragging their feet like this, especially after the U.S. DOJ already provided approval. We're just talking about the merger of two companies - why create an anti-monopoly investigation for that?
Because it involves one of the biggest Database producers (Oracle) and one of the most common cheap, Open Source Database products (MySQL), and there is valid concern that Oracle will try to undercut MySQL in order to boost its namesake product that customers pay a hefty sum for. Granted, the original MySQL developers have pretty much already left Sun and forked MySQL (MariaDB, etc.); but it still remains a concern.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
If you actually read the article in the NYT, they point out that Oracle submitted its request to European authorities two months after they submitted the request to American authorities. So you shouldn't be complaining about how slow Europe is for another two months -- the US just approved the merger days ago.
Doing double duty, the post also adds to the weight of evidence that posts which begin with "meh" are equivalent to line noise.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
What mill dust are you cranking?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
The European Commission is sluggish by nature. Additionally, in merge or anti-trust issues they like to wait for the US decision first.
In the Oracle-Sun case the DOJ decision is quite fresh and August is sacrosanct holiday month in Brussels. Now the Eurocrats are back to work and there *is* a decision on the merge although not officially finalized. You just have got to read the European oracles.
The decision is: either Oracle sells mySQL or they will face a very lengthy procedure and in the end an adverse outcome. So it is really up to the playboy in charge at Oracle. If he wants an end to uncertainty, he has to dump mySQL now.
Does anyone have any info on what might become of OpenSolaris? The more I read about it, the more I want to explore it, however, I am loath to invest time into something that might be put out to pasture in the near future. Even though the code is open, from what I have read it will probably stagnate if its paid developers are pulled. ? MOE
SARAVA!
The European Commission is not abusing american companies. They have an obligation to ensure, in this particular case, that Oracle is not buying Sun to undermine MySQL development, and to eliminate a competitor. In fact, in the past, the EU regulatory authorities have been very lenient with US firms. For example, the fine Microsoft received in Europe was relatively small compared to the actual harm caused. Most people agree that Microsoft should have been broken up to create competing Windows/Office suite products. This would definitely have stimulated competition. As usual, however, the US government was interfering in the affairs of other nations to support the interests of a powerful company, to the detriment of their own people, who would have significantly benefited from an alternate version of Windows/Office.
I sometimes wonder how the stupid and ignorant nationalistic mindset of some americans develops. The rest of the world has always favoured some degree of regulation to stimulate competition. Although the US government is the largest (in terms of proportion of GDP on public spending) and most interventionist in the world, it has almost always tended to favour those who can afford lobbyists, and campaign contributions, and has consistently pursued an economic policies that work against its own people.
Many of us now look in horror at what the United States has become, with its tent cities, third world health care, lack of proper public services, and mass unemployment.
While the EU may be slow and lethargic, it does, at least, not suffer from the massive degree of corruption that is prevalent in Washington.
While I don't believe that Oracle/Sun are particularly relevant/important in the modern world, I do think that is important that we preserve some form of government that is detached from powerful interest groups. Most Europeans do not want to see a corporate dictatorship like the US regime.
EU is holding up the merger because Oracle want to kill MySql and knew full well that if they didn't spin that piece off as part of the plan, they would actually be exposed by those intelligent and diligent anti-trust regulators in the EU....as opposed to our corporate monopoly toadies over here in the good old USA, inc.
Just because the venture capitalists told you your shares were worth $1.8M it doesn't mean that they were. In fact, until you sell them, they aren't worth anything. It was a confidence trick. Don't feel daft. Many have fallen for the same scam before you, and many will fall for it in the future. Those magical figures printed on a bit of paper or sent to you in an email addled your brains.
You were never rich.
but between the DoJ taking its time and the European Commission, which seems to get off on abusing American firms,
I am so sorry that your poor Yanks companies feel abused by the European Union, but you see, we have millions of consumers to protect and avoid being shafted. Those people aren't sheep and aren't ready to accept the same level of FUD that you guys can swallow.
More seriously, there is a difference between stating facts, and spitting free unrelated and uninformed criticism on a headline. The OP totally fails at objective journalism. But wait...I'm on Slashdot..never mind.
"the European Commission, which seems to get off on abusing American firms"
better that than dropping bombs on Afghan civilians, eh Freedom Lovers?
Well, it's almost like there's more Anime than TV at TVTropes anyway. :)
Maybe I'm getting hot under the collar over nothing. I'm not meaning to carry on with some kind of flame war.
Perhaps I'm being overly feisty.
Profit.
(CAPTCHA: vileness)
Sun's own dirty tactics are used against them.
When I was consulting at a very large Wall Street bank SUN offered to buy out all the NeXT computers and replace them with SUN machines (sparc 5's mostly). For a while we had both on our desks. One of the brand new SUN workstations caught fire and shot a six in flame out it's side scorching the NeXTstation next to it!!! Yes a mark was left.
So as the Sun sets life repeats itself.