Slashdot Mirror


Ex-Sun CEO Warns Oracle of Death By Open Source

gearystwatcher writes "Former Sun CEO Scott McNealy talks to The Reg on where things went wrong, and acquisition by Oracle: 'We probably got a little too aggressive near the end and probably open sourced too much and tried too hard to appease the community and tried too hard to share,' McNealy said. 'You gotta take care of your shareholders or you end up very vulnerable like we got. We were a wonderful acquisition — we got stolen for a song at the bottom of the Dow.'"

2 of 408 comments (clear)

  1. Sales process sucked by spinkham · · Score: 4, Informative

    Did anyone ever try to buy things from Sun?

    No other company I ever worked with made it so hard. Unless you were a megacustomer, it was actually fairly difficult to actually buy anything from them.

    In contrast, buying RedHat on the small scale is click, click, done.

    Here's a summary of Ellison's rant on why Sun died, notice the complaints are mostly about sales and engineering decisions, open source had very little to do with it:

    http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2010/05/13/oracles-ellison-sun-execs-were-astonishingly-bad-managers/

    --
    Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
  2. Re:Business vs Open Source by Rexdude · · Score: 3, Informative

    .......yet lacks such newfangled things as OpenGL support

    Say what? OpenGL has been supported since Java 5, which is itself over 4 years old.

    --
    "..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."