Oracle Asks Apache To Rethink Java Committee Exit

CWmike writes "Oracle has asked the Apache Software Foundation to reconsider its decision to quit the Java SE/EE Executive Committee, and is also acknowledging the ASF's importance to Java's future. In a message released late Thursday, an Oracle executive made conciliatory gestures to Apache. At least for now, the ASF doesn't seem eager to rejoin the committee. 'Give us a reason why the ASF should reconsider other than "please,"' ASF president Jim Jagielski said in a Twitter post on Thursday. The Java Community Process is 'dead,' Jagielski said in a blog post, also on Thursday. 'All that remains is a zombie, walking the streets of the Java ecosystem, looking for brains.'"

Comments

They reconsidered

[Arancaytar]

Answer is still no.

Re:They reconsidered

[hedwards]

I'm wondering what Oracle's angle is on this. They haven't been particularly concerned with developers walking out in a mass exodus. Or is it just a matter of it looking really bad for them to lose that support?

Re:They reconsidered

[SerpentMage]

Look at Oracle's head honcho Larry Ellison... A macho alpha male that MUST under all circumstances have control. The moment Ellison leaves Oracle will collapse since corporations like his do very badly with their hallowed leader.

Once you see that you see the angle of Oracle. Oracle I think really doesn't give a flying f**k and they are now starting to understand the jello nature of Open Source. By jello I mean you squeeze jello hard and all you get is ooze coming out between your fingers. I would be really surprised if Oracle caved in. I bet Ellison is thinking, "no f***g way some open source hippies are going to make me bend, me a billionaire"

If you think I am being harsh, look at Ellison when he takes "time off" like sailing! This is not a guy I would ever want to hang out with. At least with Bill Gates I could play cards...

Re:They reconsidered

[0100010001010011]

What the CEO thinks is a bunch of basement dwellers tinkering with OpenSolaris and OpenOffice vs "The" webserver for the internet (even if it's those same set of people tinkering with it).

Apache is a big enough name that hopefully the IT guys heard they were leaving and flipped out a bit.

 

Re:They reconsidered

[mark72005]

I don't think Oracle is particularly concerned with anything other than its core products and profit-making from those. I think the philosophy has emerged there that it's becoming less important to do things that may have nebulous or down-the-road benefit in favor of only putting effort into things from which you can draw a straight line to profit.

Re:They reconsidered

[nigelo]

...less important to do things that may have nebulous or down-the-road benefit in favor of only putting effort into things from which you can draw a straight line to profit.

Which has been Oracle's apparent MO since the beginning, I would say.

Re:They reconsidered

[erroneus]

Oracle uses a bully business model. With their database product, they charge and are paid unbelievable amounts of money and can demand prices based on the hardware you run their software on. (You can afford to buy a big beefy server, so you much also be able to afford a big beefy price for the SAME software you had before you upgraded your hardware!)

They have been successful with their ridiculous model. So it stands to reason that when they bought Sun, they can just step right up and start bullying some more and continue to get their way. They failed to factor in the fact that users have pre-existing expectations of "free" and "open" that is simply not a part of Oracle mindset. So their newly acquired "free stuff" is rapidly losing value due to the new ownership and management.

Already, The Document Foundation has abandoned Oracle's ship and took LibreOffice with them. Now ASF has left the ship as well. What's next? Will VirtualBox OSE become something else soon? What about MySQL?

In this case, whatever Oracle touches is turning to dust because they do not have a pure heart.

Re:They reconsidered

[badboy_tw2002]

What's wrong with sailing? If you had said "no holds barred bloodsport" that might have fit your argument a little more.

Re:They reconsidered

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought MySQL was already forked to the point of too many prongs.

Re:They reconsidered

[PCM2]

I don't think the GP's point is that there's something wrong with sailing. More that when most people "take time off," they do so to go bird watching, or to take the kids to Disneyland, or just to lie around on a beach getting tanned. Ellison "takes time off" to command the crew of a multimillion-dollar racing yacht that's the fastest in the world.

Re:They reconsidered

[ocdscouter]

I was wondering if there wasn't an oblique reference to something Ellison did while sailing during a particular "time off". (This one time at yacht camp...)

Re:They reconsidered

[peragrin]

I spend 25 weeks every summer racing sailboats, 3-4 times a week.

And ellison's boat isn't the fastest in the world, but it is among them. The fastest went 55 knots in 25 knots of wind.

Re:They reconsidered

[interval1066]

If Oracle's attitude toward the Java community is still an overlord over serfs, what's to consider? Christ, what's the upside for the ASF in staying:? Seriously.

Re:They reconsidered

[SerpentMage]

Thanks for clearing that up. Yeah that is exactly what I meant.

Re:They reconsidered

[Anonymous Coward]

I spend 25 weeks every summer racing sailboats, 3-4 times a week.

And ellison's boat isn't the fastest in the world, but it is among them. The fastest went 55 knots in 25 knots of wind.

What planet?

Re:They reconsidered

[M. Baranczak]

I'm wondering what Oracle's angle is on this. They haven't been particularly concerned with developers walking out in a mass exodus. Or is it just a matter of it looking really bad for them to lose that support?

And they're still not particularly concerned. It doesn't cost them anything to say "please come back". If they really wanted Apache back, they'd give them what they want, which is the compatibility kit licensing.

Re:They reconsidered

[Elbart]

Thank you for that laugh, kind Sir or Madam.

Re:They reconsidered

[Pharmboy]

And PostgreSQL has gained interest and mindshare. Microsoft is probably giddy with excitement over all the fragmentation.

Re:They reconsidered

[TemporalBeing]

I'm wondering what Oracle's angle is on this. They haven't been particularly concerned with developers walking out in a mass exodus. Or is it just a matter of it looking really bad for them to lose that support?

They probably see ASF as a big community player and want them on board; but unless ASF can put Harmony through and gain 100% acceptance as a Java implementer without the conditions that Sun/Oracle have imposed then there is no reason for them to stay in the JCP.

If they really want to bring ASF back, they'll let Harmony use the test kit as ASF desires without limitation. That's probably all it would take.

Re:They reconsidered

[Red Flayer]

I don't think Oracle is particularly concerned with anything other than its core products and profit-making from those.

What?

Oracle has been acquiring companies up the vertical* for many years.

I think the philosophy has emerged there that it's becoming less important to do things that may have nebulous or down-the-road benefit in favor of only putting effort into things from which you can draw a straight line to profit.

I think they've been trying to avoid corporate bloat while still making acquisitions that make sense.

*And by 'up the vertical', I don't mean 'where the sun don't shine'. I mean middleware, consulting, etc.

Re:They reconsidered

[david_thornley]

Earth, of course. On most wind angles, the sails provide propulsion by being airfoils, not things for the wind to push against. Further, when sailing nearly upwind, the speed of the wind across the sails is the wind speed plus most of the boat speed, so it's possible to get a very high speed of wind over airfoil.

It's complicated, and you don't need to understand the mechanics unless you like sailboats, but, yes, it is possible to move faster than the wind speed. If you have a chance, watch iceboat racing sometime. Same principle.

Re:They reconsidered

[claytonjr]

He must sail his boat around Gulf Coast, near Mississippi, where the 4 seasons are Almost Summer, Summer, Still Summer, and Christmas.

Re:They reconsidered

[PitaBred]

Look at the bolded text in the post you replied to.

He was wondering on what planet summers were 25 weeks long. Not on what planet you could do 55 knots with a 25 knot wind.

Re:They reconsidered

[SplashMyBandit]

Its is not the "free stuff" that is valuable, or "rapidly losing value". What is of value is the "goose that lays the golden egg" - ecosystem of developers (paid and casual) and users that use the stuff, improve it, and especially *provide support to others* (which is what everyone really wants - from client companies to Stallman). Oracle sees the value as the software, but the greatest value is in having the 'mind share' of an active community (something Microsoft are famous for recognizing, even if they treat their users all like criminals). With a big community you can make money, since companies will pay for support and customizations of widely used stuff (eg. market leaders such as Apache HTTP and Tomcat) but you need a 'light hand on the tiller'.

Oracle may deride Sun for messing up sales (yes, it was unnecessarily hard to buy stuff from Sun due to their crap sales process) but Oracle are just as clueless when it comes to maintaining a valuable established ecosystem. The Oracle management are destroying shareholder value by totally misreading where the value in Sun's assets really lies (dinosaurs! but that is typical of chief executive management, what made you successful a decade ago may ot be required anymore when the world outside your walls has evolved).

Re:They reconsidered

[SplashMyBandit]

About time. Postgresql is an excellent database. It's the best general purpose one, IMHO - for a variety of reasons, including the ability to deploy as many as you need in your cluster to get fantastic performance (whereas other supposedly faster databases are slower since you can't afford the license fees to scale indefinitely).

Re:They reconsidered

[Anonymous Coward]

It's complicated, and you don't need to understand the mechanics unless you like sailboats, but, yes, it is possible to move faster than the wind speed. If you have a chance, watch iceboat racing sometime. Same principle.

I still don't think any of that will get you 25 weeks of summer per year ;)

Re:They reconsidered

[BigFootApe]

The days of gentlemen skippers are long gone. America's cup teams now use professional crews and professional skippers. USA 17 (the current cup holder) was helmed by Russell Coutts. Larry didn't "command the crew", Russell did. Larry's most important task was to support Russell financially and organizationally.

I don't mean to take away from Larry's abilities as a sailor, but simply to point out the commitment required of sailors at the top levels of competition. It's no longer the hobby it was 30 years ago. It is a life and a career.

Re:They reconsidered

[LordLucless]

Planets with two hemispheres? I know snowboarders who chase winter around the world for half of the year.

Re:They reconsidered

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the GP (different AC, BTW) meant "on what planet do you have 25 weeks of summer per year".

Re:They reconsidered

[StikyPad]

Good question. Based on his statement, we're probably looking for a planet with two hemispheres, an axial tilt, and a period of ~365.25 days or so... Let me know if you come up with anything.

Re:They reconsidered

[klscott]

Its always summer someplace - Larry moves his boat accordingly.

Re:They reconsidered

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in the java world and freaked out a little bit...

Re:They reconsidered

[hairyfeet]

Why do you think old Larry bought Sun then? He bought it because it gives him a "top to bottom" solution ala IBM, where he can have custom SPARC chips running a highly optimized Solaris with both making Oracle one of the, if not the fastest DB on the planet. From there he can sell not only hw/sw, he can sell consulting, an "Oracle Cloud" based solution, etc. Guys here can hate old Larry all they want, hell he probably is an asshole. But he knows how to get his ROI and will make another mountain of cash off of Sun.

Re:They reconsidered

[mehemiah]

hardely, "many". Drizzle and mariaDB are only two prongs. Maria is really supposed to be CentOS to Oracle's Redhat

Re:They reconsidered

[Anonymous Coward]

Well both are funny ! :-)

Re:They reconsidered

[putaro]

I used to work with a guy who had been in Silicon Valley forever. One time we were playing one of those party games where you have to match some "claim to fame" to the person. His was "I tipped Larry Ellison on his ass" - the longer story was they were playing tennis (back when Larry was not such a big deal) and he was an asshole and tried to start a fight and got bounced.

Re:They reconsidered

[Anonymous Coward]

What planet?

Mars most likey...

Re:They reconsidered

[Mark Atwood]

MySQL already has left the building. Look to Drizzle, and the other MySQL forks (Monty Project, ferex), and the non-Oracle support companies (Blue Gecko, Palamino, Pythian, OpenQuery, SkySQL).

Re:They reconsidered

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in the java world and freaked out a little bit

I didn't. Java needs a kick in the ass. Looking past the TCK squabble, Java has been rotting for years and whatever Apache was contributing as a JCP executive member didn't prevent that. Maybe, just maybe Java will benefit from some unilateral Oracle single mindedness. Committee Java wasn't going anywhere.

Re:They reconsidered

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd think with all of that money he'd be able to buy himself some fucking eyebrows.

Re:They reconsidered

[TangoMargarine]

If he was in Antartica (and presumably mounted the sailboat on skis or something) he could technically get 25 weeks of summer. Although it's probably a stretch to say that Antarctica has any season other than "F**king Cold."

Re:They reconsidered

[Anonymous Coward]

It's always summer somewhere on the planet...

Re:They reconsidered

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the point of incredulity is the 25 weeks of summer. Since there are 52 weeks in a year, and 4 seasons, each season has about 13 weeks, not 25. Then again, if you move every six months, you could have 25-26 weeks of summer by living in the southern hemisphere from december to april, and then moving to the northern hemisphere.

Have I thought of doing just that? Heck yeah!

Re:They reconsidered

[CrimsonAvenger]

He was wondering on what planet summers were 25 weeks long.

Well, the US Gulf Coast, for one example.

Though come to that, 25 weeks is a pretty short summer around here.

Re:They reconsidered

[Anonymous Coward]

His statement implies an individual summer (i.e., "every summer") is at least 25 weeks long, which means your proposed solution doesn't fit.

Re:They reconsidered

[Anonymous Coward]

>What planet?

This one, especially when you have your own private jet and leisure time all year. And if you don't need to be bound to a meterological definition of "summer", I'm sure you can find a location conducive to the sport somewhere on the planet any time you want. Also consider that there are weather effects to be found in the tropical wet season that are not experienced in dry season, and this is of interest to some sporting mariners.

Re:They reconsidered

[Pharmboy]

Earth, of course.

I think the question of planet was regarding the bolded statement: "I spend 25 weeks every summer racing sailboats," This seems to contradict the fact that on most planets that humans live on, the summers are around 13 weeks long. That might be why he did bother to bold, as he quoted the entire parent's post.

Re:They reconsidered

[Anonymous Coward]

All that drive and ambition and he *still* can't deliver a DBMS that can tell the difference between NULL and an empty string :-)

Re:They reconsidered

[geminidomino]

Although it's probably a stretch to say that Antarctica has any season other than "F**king Cold."

Sure they do. "REALLY fucking cold"

Re:They reconsidered

[jobst]

52 (weeks in a year) / 4 ( seasons in a year) * 2 (hemispheres) = 26.

It does ;-)

Re:They reconsidered

[vegiVamp]

Heh. Posting to undo moderations as I missed that, too. Must be too early yet. 25 weeks of summer is indeed quite unlikely, but I guess there are places where you get that much summer-like weather.

Re:They reconsidered

[Anonymous Coward]

Earth, just more equatorial than you are thinking!

Summer is almost that long (for sailing) here in New Zealand - for that matter you can sail all winter too!

Re:They reconsidered

[Anonymous Coward]

That whooshing sound ... it isn't the wind.

Re:They reconsidered

[Anonymous Coward]

You could sail 52 weeks per summer per year, if you want and if you have a robust boat and an understanding wife / husband / hamster.

Re:They reconsidered

[StikyPad]

It didn't imply that at all, you simply inferred it.

Re:They reconsidered

[petermgreen]

can demand prices based on the hardware you run their software on.
That sounds like a perfectly reasonable way of charging for server software to me.
Charging per machine means those who buy big beefy servers get the software cheaper than those who buy equivalent hardware in the form of more lower end boxes.
Charging per end user makes it very expensive for a new customer to set up with you, and makes your product virtually unusable for certain classes of system (e.g. those systems that provide a small ammount of service to a lot of users and/or offer services to the general public over the internet). It is also difficult to audit.

Can you suggest anything better than charging based on the ammount of hardware someone has in their machines?

Re:They reconsidered

[erroneus]

If you rent a car, they charge by the miles you drive, okay. But what if they charged by the number of people you carried in the car? Okay, maybe not the best analogy. What if they charged more for the same car because I wore a suit and a tie when I went to pick it up?

And as for "can you think of a better way?" You are asking the wrong person -- I think software should be free. But I will say that given the typical EULA whuch denies that the software you buy is not guaranteed to be suitable for any purpose, whether stated or implied, simply a lot of crap. If someone built me a house and made me sign a paper that says "we cannot guarantee this will not collapse and kill your entire family" I would be pretty hesitant about it. (EULA disclaimer of any and all responsibility are 'industry standard' though ain't it?)

The point is charging for software based on how I intend to use it means they want to know how I intend to use it which should not and should never be their right. For all they know, I am building a computer from a pile of transistors at radio shack. It shouldn't matter to them. They don't guarantee anything in the first place.

Best quote ever.

[Pharmboy]

'All that remains is a zombie, walking the streets of the Java ecosystem, looking for brains.'

Best quote ever. Hopefully, Oracle will get the clue and realize that you have play nice, even when you own the toys. Otherwise, you play alone.

Re:Best quote ever.

[SerpentMage]

I would really be surprised if Oracle reconsiders. Oracle and Ellison himself are alpha males with no compromise. Oracle revolves around Ellison and I doubt he cares. He probably just thinks, "screw off I am here to make money not be an open source hippie!"

Larry Ellison believes in growth by acquisition. He does not do it organically and so he really does not care about Java other than he has control and is able to sell it to the enterprise. He does not care about third parties! He only cares about how Oracle can make more money. It would not surprise me if Larry is thinking of taking Java private to f**k over IBM and everybody else. But hey I think IBM just signed a deal with Oracle...

Re:Best quote ever.

[putaro]

Well, they backed down on Peoplesoft at least for a while. I haven't looked - is Peoplesoft still a standalone, supported product line?

Re:Best quote ever.

[Anthony Mouse]

He does not do it organically and so he really does not care about Java other than he has control and is able to sell it to the enterprise.

This might work well enough when you're selling a database. But Java is a language. If people stop improving or writing code in Java because Oracle is being a prick then "owning" Java will be like "owning" Cobol: It might not be totally worthless but the value will only go down over time.

And the original point of Java was to get people to write code that would run on Solaris and SPARC even if most people are running it on Windows and Intel. I don't know if Oracle cares whether there continues to be any third party software that will run on SPARC, but if they want people to buy SPARC hardware and associated service contracts then they probably ought to consider caring about that sort of thing.

Re:Best quote ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I would really be surprised if Oracle reconsiders."

Isn't that rather Larry Ellison-ish?

I bet previous to their asking Apache back, you held the position that Oracle didn't give a damn that Apache left and would never kotow to Apache in any way whatsoever; even a hollow gesture would be out of the question.

Given your opinions and rants on this thread, you'd still think you were right even if they did reconsider. You'd just rephrase it that they didn't consider enough, capitulate enough, etc.

I'm in agreement with you in that Ellison is an ass. I'm in agreement that Oracle is wrong here on many and multiple levels. I'm not in agreement with your carpet bombing approach to attacking him and anything associated with him. He wants to off some of his fortune sailing and pushing sailing tech? What beef do you really have with that? Sounds totally geek to me. Some geeks get done with their day jobs and overclock to hell. Some run LAN clubs. Some soup their cars up. Others fabricate shit and run a team.

I think you tread on the wrong way of thinking when you go about "winning" the way you do. He wants to get hands on competitive racing because he can? Good for him. He's dick because he's WRONG and the so many documented why his approach is wrong here. Not because he's competitive and driven.

You really come off as someone attacking someone personally, as in anything associated with Ellison, because he's Ellison, is wrong. That speaks of jealousy, not rational argument.

Re:Best quote ever.

[turkeyfish]

and like in the Night of the Living dead the Java community neighborhood is looking as though no one but zombies is taking care of it. Its already starting to wither and loose mindshare to other communities of users.

The reality is that the vendor lock-in model mindset of Oracle corporation and others is becoming the order of the day and the concept of reuseable software is dead. Soon, if you want to cut and paste, you will have to have your credit card ready.

Re:Best quote ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why I am not surprise with IBM's move?

Re:Best quote ever.

[Almost-Retired]

"looking for brains" nice summation/quote, love it , "play nice or play alone", reality

Its the latter that Ellison will do. Sun java is dead, but the autopsy and last rights may be 5 years in the making as it slowly starves to death.

With ASF gone from the java development scene, but their software running 95% of the worlds web servers these days, you will I think, see something like Ruby/python, perhaps even perl, to come in to do all the stuff java has been asked to do, and when that gets to where its actually usable for a 'purty' web page, maybe as quickly as 2 years if enough bodies are working on it, java will be gone from the web for the same reason one buries a dead mule, to get rid of the stink.

Ever more exploits will be found & unless Oracle finds the bodies to maintain the fixes required, and shoves them out the door at zero cost to the users, java will have self-destructed because people will turn it off forever without that instant support, some portion of which I'm sure ASF has written the paychecks for. So Oracle will have to assume those costs in order to just maintain java's market penetration. I don't see that happening either.

And once again, Larry will be king of his his own domain, but it will not be the 800 pound gorilla on the web that apache is now. By then I may be gone since I'm already 76, so if it doesn't happen that way, it will only be because Ellison finally understands how the web actually works. Based on past performances over the last 20 years, I don't see that happening.

My $0.02 worth in 1934 dollars, adjust for inflation.

--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
There are three kinds of people: men, women, and unix.

Re:Best quote ever.

[nikkipolya]

No. They won't. I bet.

Re:Best quote ever.

[nikkipolya]

Yeah! IBM signed a deal with Oracle. But, still, Oracle will f**k IBM just for laughs and lashings.

Re:Best quote ever.

[nikkipolya]

Perl/Ruby? I don't think so. They might gain some tiny market share but that will be it. Python? May be a little more. Java may live on for a few more decades just like the other older programming languages from my fathers era still live on. But, I think the .NET platform is going to gain a whole lot of traction out of this mess. Unless there is new entrant into the scene, a counter weight to the M$ hegemony, that will be. May be Google GO? But it doesn't seem like Google is serious or in a hurry as yet. Got to wait and watch on that one.

King Midas

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle has the Midas Touch. Everything they touch turns into a profitable venture--I mean, if you don't count the ones that became completely useless as a result.

Re:King Midas

[rtfa-troll]

Oracle has the Midas Touch. Everything they touch turns into a profitable venture--I mean, if you don't count the ones that became completely useless as a result.

You have completely misunderstood. There is no better way to make a profitable venture than selling something that is useless. The trick how you succeed in the selling, but once you have done that, the opportunities for consulting are endless.

Re:King Midas

[thanasakis]

"not a Midas touch of Gold, but a Midas touch of death"

Re:King Midas

[Anonymous Coward]

That was the curse of King Midas; everyone he cared about died when he touched then. Now consider why this may not be a problem for Larry Ellison...

Cynical but true...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure even Larry and Company realize the importance of not angering every single one of your customers. If you drive absolutely everyone off your ubiquitous application platform, and no one wants to develop for it anymore, you don't get the opportunity to lock them into your products.

Granted, every single Sun customer I've talked to (including myself) is running away from Solaris and SPARC as fast as they can. SPARC hardware was great, the OS was good for an enterprisey Unix, but everyone's scared to death of Oracle quadrupling the price for next year's service contract and making a mess of support.

When it comes to hardware and Solaris, Oracle doesn't give a damn. What they do care about is their application platforms. Almost every CS program in the country is pumping out Java coders, many enterprisey applications have been written in Java/J2EE over the past 10 years, etc. Keeping developers interested in the Java/J2EE ecosystem is important long-term. Even if they don't want to support non-Oracle apps on Java, having a critical mass of Java coders means they have someone to maintain the disasters that they have to integrate like PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and other Oracle-developed products. If people stop writing for the platform, and Oracle doesn't at least maintain the illusion of an open standard, the platform goes away, as does the lock-in opportunity.

Although, I've never seen an acquiring company come down so hard on acquired customers before. Friends have been telling stories of their Oracle reps coming in and trying to double the price of their service contracts since the takeover. The entire secondary/hobbyist market for Solaris OS and SPARC hardware is toast because you can't even get firmware updates for hardware without Oracle service contracts. Maybe someone is realizing that they need to lighten up a little?? Nah...

Re:Cynical but true...

[rudy_wayne]

Although, I've never seen an acquiring company come down so hard on acquired customers before. Friends have been telling stories of their Oracle reps coming in and trying to double the price of their service contracts since the takeover. The entire secondary/hobbyist market for Solaris OS and SPARC hardware is toast because you can't even get firmware updates for hardware without Oracle service contracts. Maybe someone is realizing that they need to lighten up a little?? Nah...

Recently, someone analyzed Oracle's latest financial reports and discovered something interesting. Although Oracle appears to be very profitable, it all comes from maintenance contracts. Take away the maintenance revenue and they lost money. This means that Oracle probably doesn't give a rat's ass about Java or who they alienate, as long as they can continue to milk the cash cow of maintenance revenue.

Re:Cynical but true...

[Doomdark]

but everyone's scared to death of Oracle quadrupling the price for next year's service contract and making a mess of support.

True. And while I don't know the exact details (wrt is it factor of 4 or something else), I do know that support contract costs have already risen; and this is big part of why my employer is urgently working on moving systems that still run on Solaris boxes (minority) to run on linux systems (which is already majority). Likewise there are projects to move DBs off of Oracle; although mostly to MySQL which may not be complete solution. But at least for now MySQL support is still much less expensive than Oracle DB, and may remain so because of different profiling (expensive "enterprise" DB, slightly less expensive "medium-size" mysql).

These fears are well-founded; Oracle is competent at squeezing more money out of existing customers. That's why they are so profitable.

Re:Cynical but true...

[ozbird]

I attended the InSync10 conference earlier this year. One of the presentations described - in colourful language - all of the ways that Oracle will "f**k you over" - if you let them. The only way to deal with Oracle is to fight back; migrating away from their products is one way to negotiate with the PFYs in sales (who apart from being under unrealistic quotas, probably view Larry as a god.)

Re:Cynical but true...

[SplashMyBandit]

Shame you use MySQL, it's worth looking at Postgresql.

Re:Cynical but true...

[Mike Van Pelt]

I'm sure even Larry and Company realize the importance of not angering every single one of your customers. If you drive absolutely everyone off your ubiquitous application platform, and no one wants to develop for it anymore, you don't get the opportunity to lock them into your products.

Hey, it's always worked for Intuit.

Re:Cynical but true...

[marcosdumay]

Then, why did they invest a pile of money on Sun again? Just to kill a competitor (and turn people into a superior free option at the same time)?

Re:Cynical but true...

[sqlrob]

Have you looked at the commercial licensing costs for MySQL, also owned by Oracle?

Re:Cynical but true...

[marcosdumay]

Even if you can't migrate to PostgreSQL because no one may be selling support for your area, there a plenty of comercial MySQL forks. Dumping Oracle for another Oracle product is quite... illogic.

Re:Cynical but true...

[Anonymous Coward]

but everyone's scared to death of Oracle quadrupling the price for next year's service contract and making a mess of support.

True. And while I don't know the exact details (wrt is it factor of 4 or something else), I do know that support contract costs have already risen; and this is big part of why my employer is urgently working on moving systems that still run on Solaris boxes (minority) to run on linux systems (which is already majority).
Likewise there are projects to move DBs off of Oracle; although mostly to MySQL which may not be complete solution. But at least for now MySQL support is still much less expensive than Oracle DB, and may remain so because of different profiling (expensive "enterprise" DB, slightly less expensive "medium-size" mysql).

This sounds like an excellent opportunity for a third-party support company. Perhaps IBM/Tivoli, or AIC, etc. Kind of the way Amdahl/Wang did with IBM hardware (and support) back in the '70s.

Re:Cynical but true...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny, but I'm listening to a bunch of techies whining about Oracle. They are a business, plain and simple, not a government for pete's sake..
Fact was that Sun ran a poor business, they were heading to the chap 11 heap in the sky back in 2004.

If MS, HP, IBM, SAP, Intel, Apple or even Google, Yahoo bought them, we'd see the same result. It's the lesser of two evils here, so guys needs to quit the righteous whining.

From it's long history. Sun had a decent relationship with the FOSS community, iPlanet, StarOffice, OS patches, etc.. And at this point, one could say it was a hefty price to pay which lead to its purchase.

Re:Cynical but true...

[eulernet]

I'm sure even Larry and Company realize the importance of not angering every single one of your customers. ...Friends have been telling stories of their Oracle reps coming in and trying to double the price of their service contracts since the takeover.

You don't really know how business works.

First, it's the CEO who decides the policy, so he probably wants a quick ROI -Return On Investment- on Sun's buyout. Sales people just have to follow what is decided by the Big Boss.

Secondly, Oracle doesn't care about losing Sun's clients, since it hopes to make the remaining clients pay for the lost business. Even if they lose 50% of their clients, if they are able to sell the same services twice as much, they'll probably earn more money, since the maintenance costs will be cheaper with less clients (they need less people, etc.).

This strategy could backfire if more than 50% of clients don't accept the conditions.
In this case, Oracle will just charge even more for its services.

Re:Cynical but true...

[tkrotchko]

"Almost every CS program in the country is pumping out Java coders"

Back in the day, a computer science degree had very little to do with coding.

Re:Cynical but true...

[sjames]

If they continue alienating everyone, there won't be any maintenance revenue.

Re:Cynical but true...

[ADRA]

Don't be so down on Oracle with this. This is pretty much the business model of most software developers. You don't necessarily make 100% of your investment back from first sales, but through support and maintenance, and updates, and customizations, etc.. Do you think the insane revenue from Windows comes free? No. They paid for Windows development for decades, and these quarters are the ROI from that. This is why some companies that look completely dead can still make good money long after they ever have anything interesting to contribute to innovation.

Do I hope Oracle dies? No. Do I hope that they have a better executed and more open Java strategy going forward? Absolutely. This poor attempt at executing their Java strategy post-acquisition has been nothing but horrible. Smarten up Oracle!

Re:Cynical but true...

[hotfireball]

Dude, MySQL is probably considered dead to us. It is the same Oracle now (from business point of view), and just different label to hook customers.

Instead, we dumped Oracle and moved to PostgreSQL, despite of many MySQL promising forks around. Those, who needs professional and official support for PostgreSQL, might look around for variety of companies doing this. For example, http://www.enterprisedb.com/ etc.

Re:Cynical but true...

[yuhong]

I think it is obvious from parent that they did.

Re:Cynical but true...

[mcrbids]

Wha...?

Postgres is better. End of statement. The only reason you havent switched is because you don't use MySql.

Re:Cynical but true...

[SplashMyBandit]

Sorry bro, ignoring the leader question, your first two sentences make sense, the third one contradicts the first two. Care to clarify?

nb: IMHO Postgres kick MySQL's ass, but I didn't want to ram this down the other guys throat.

Re:Cynical but true...

[greylion3]

For those that don't know this abbreviation:
PFYs = Pimply-Faced Youths

Originated (I think) in the stories about the BOFH (Bastard Operator From Hell).

Re:Cynical but true...

[Doomdark]

Yeah, certainly should be considered; but I am not one deciding what to use. I personally prefer Postgresql, and would start by investigating it but others have different opinions. And in the end I think both can be made to work. Decisions to use MySQL were done quite a while ok so Oracle ownership was not a factor back in the day when opinions seem to have formed.

Looking at the bigger picture

[Bruce Perens]

Was it ever a good idea for Apache to participate in Java in the first place, knowing that the exact situation that they are complaining about today existed when they started, and has existed for the entire time they've been developing?

When we're finished with this one, we can think about Open Source projects and .NET .

Bruce

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Anonymous Coward]

I've thought about .NET... the answer is still no.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Anonymous Coward]

You meant that in a "look at this Java mess, why the fuck would anyone want to mess around with MS?" way, right? :)

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[inode_buddha]

I don't know the answer to that, but I do know this: there is a *lot* of Java out there, being served by Apache based servers. From a strictly business standpoint, Apache is in a good position to know what devs want. And by extension, they know what businesses want. Oracle would be foolish to lose that expertise and insight, to what is a huge market.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[asc99c]

It isn't black and white - but the shade of grey has been getting darker since the Oracle takeover. I'd say they've taken a pragmatic view that Java had a lot going for it, despite not being 100% open. It seemed to me the shine had been coming off Java for a while before the Oracle takeover anyway - there are plenty of gems in there, but getting useful stuff done still seems a bit cumbersome.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[eln]

This is what really puzzles me about this whole thing. Now that Sun has been acquired by the Evil Empire (tm), everybody acts like Sun was some paragon of Open Source virtue. Sun always approached open source very timidly, and only ever seemed to make the bare minimum gestures toward open source, just enough to generate some good press about it. None of Sun's "open source" licenses have been anywhere near what most people would consider really "open". Open Source has always been more about marketing than philosophy with Sun.

Given this, all Oracle has really done so far is explicitly state some of the restrictions on the software that were basically already in place, just not actually in writing, with Sun. However, since Sun was a "good" company and Oracle is a "bad" company, everyone is suddenly abandoning ship. Oracle is likely to keep all of this software, especially Java, just as "open" as it ever was (that being not very open at all). However, since Sun was a techie darling and Oracle has long been seen as a villain within the community, everyone is acting like everything's changed even though very little actually has.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[DragonWriter]

Was it ever a good idea for Apache to participate in Java in the first place, knowing that the exact situation that they are complaining about today existed when they started, and has existed for the entire time they've been developing?

Possibly. Certainly, the fact that Oracle is publicly appealing for them to return demonstrates that by participating, they have achieved an important role that even Oracle recognizes. Clearly, that influence wasn't enough to resolve their problems without leaving (perhaps because any suggestions they may have made that they were willing to leave over the issues weren't believed), but I don't think its at all clear that no that they have left, Oracle won't do something to accommodate their concerns to get them to come back.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[fwarren]

Not much has changed? Programmers have forked OpenSolaris, programmers have forked OpenOffice, and now Apache is forking "Open" Java.

It reminds me of a joke where a Jewish guy is so impressed by visiting a Catholic church he becomes a Catholic. So he tries calling his wife, son and daughter to tell them the news. All three are to busy to listen and hang up on him. The punchline is essentially "I have only been a gentile for 10 minutes and I have already found 3 Jews I don't like."

Only this is sort of the opposite. Sun, since converting to Oracle has been so obnoxious that they have already alienated 3 of their open source communities in less than 1 year.

With claiming ownership over others codes by threatening any who would host code someplace else, and by begging 3 communities to fork their code. Oracle is doing some outstanding work here.

Usually when one buys a company, you sell off everything of value before you destroy what ever is left. They seem to think they can skip step 3 ???? and go stright for 4. profit.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they at least had some hope that Sun would eventually see the errors of their ways. GPL'ing the J2SE VM and class library was a step forward, and the fact that the JCP even existed at all was an attempt at openness.

Now that Oracle runs the show, and has been threatening Google over Android (which uses Apache's Harmony class library), there's probably no chance of any realistic community involvement.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[eln]

That's sort of the point though. All of these forks have happened based mostly on fears of what *might* happen and a general lack of communication from Oracle. People feared what Oracle would do, and since Oracle has, to this point, done nothing to either confirm or deny those fears, people are deciding those fears were well-founded and jumping ship, even though Oracle has not done anything much different than Sun did before.

One wonders what would have happened if, say, RedHat had bought Sun (leaving aside the financial impossibility of such a thing) and simply been silent for this long. I somehow doubt so many forks would have been created. Right or wrong, the impetus for most of this activity on the community's side has been based primarily on Oracle's pre-existing reputation rather than its actions.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[tangent]

"Very timidly"? Nonsense. You want an example of open source timidity, look at Microsoft: how many substantial open-source programs do they provide? By comparison, Sun was profligate. Oracle is a clear regression back along the continuum toward the Microsoft end.

The question in my mind is, does Oracle actually intend to regress like this, or are we just seeing the fallout of standard merger problems? Is this all just stemming from mismanagement, resource allocation battles, and general confusion, or is there a mandate from the top to regress?

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[M. Baranczak]

You want actions? Just off the top of my head, there was the Google lawsuit, and the killing of OpenSolaris.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[saleenS281]

Actually the CDDL, just like the BSD license, is considered by "most people" to be MORE open than the GPL. A corporation should have the right to produce closed-source software and link with other closed-source software, as well as make changes to the code, without having to share it. Restricting their ability to do so is not more free, or more open.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what really puzzles me about this whole thing. Now that Sun has been acquired by the Evil Empire (tm), everybody acts like Sun was some paragon of Open Source virtue. Sun always approached open source very timidly, and only ever seemed to make the bare minimum gestures toward open source, just enough to generate some good press about it. None of Sun's "open source" licenses have been anywhere near what most people would consider really "open". Open Source has always been more about marketing than philosophy with Sun.

What exactly "really 'open'"?

CDDL was open source 'verified' by the OSI. They GPLed Java. They GPLed OpenOffice. They gave the NFS spec to the IETF. They GPLed some of their CPUs (and allowed SPARC in general to be licensed by third-parties).

What exactly is/was not open source about Sun? Which company has done better?

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[abigor]

This debate has nothing whatsoever to do with the Apache webserver.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[SplashMyBandit]

+1 Funny. Bruce you've done a lot of good things and written a lot of good things but that statement is plain crazy talk. I won't even start about all the myriad of reasons why .NET is simply not an option for many Java developers - it's been flogged to death. The eventual successor to Java is not .NET, to many strings and too platform specific (disagree? well write something with WPF and see how many platforms you get it on, and there is no way the general Windows .NET developer will use Gtk+ bindings).

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Blakey Rat]

So build something better.

Ok, so we have Java-- not open source friendly. We have C#-- not open source friendly. But at the same time, both are hugely popular. There's a gigantic demand for those types of environments here that isn't being met by anything in the open source community right now.

So bitch and moan about "oh we should move off Java, and we should move off C#", but there has to be something there to move *to*. Right now, there's jack.

And, frankly, until there's a as-good-or-better solution out there that's open source friendly, I think telling people "move off Java" is a waste of time... of course they're not going to move! There's nothing to move *to*!

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Bruce Perens]

Google's "Go" language is interesting. But I don't see any explicit rights release from Google regarding it. Maybe we should nudge them for one.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Bruce Perens]

Actually, I wanted folks to think about why .NET was also not a good idea.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[rtfa-troll]

tomcat?

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[lakeland]

Which is a shame, because from a technical perspective I really like .NET.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[rtfa-troll]

You are trolling right? The GPL has nothing to say about your "right to produce closed-source software and link with other closed-source software". It just isn't involved at all.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Blakey Rat]

Google's "Go" language is interesting.

Go might be a good start from a language perspective, but it needs huge amounts work before it even comes close to the level of C# and Java.

If you're going to replace Java, for God's sake, replace it with something that can build a decent GUI. Enough people have suffered over the decades from shitty Java GUIs, let's not subject them to any more.

Plus, Go is compiled, so it kind of misses the entire point. (I suppose the theory is that you ship your program with a just-in-time compiler? Does that currently exist?)

Plus, it's hard to Google anything related to Go because of it's stupid name. But that's relatively minor.

Personally, I'd like a solution based on JavaScript, with a couple of features added-- (optional) strong-typing and namespaces. The benefit here is that JavaScript interpreters get faster every year. The downside is the same as Go, you'd need to develop the libraries and GUI ecosystem.

But this all kind of distracts from my general point, which is: right now, the replacement for C#/Java *does not exist* in the open source community. Sure, if a hundred developers started coding their pants off on Go, maybe in 2-3 years we'd have something, but right now? Nada. This is a huge problem, if you're trying to get people to move off of C#/Java.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[saleenS281]

Really? So you can take GPL code, link it with your own, modify it, distribute it, and you don't have to re-release the source (taking it closed source)? Ya, I'm trolling.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[ChunderDownunder]

Apache should have known very well what it was getting into when it commenced the Harmony project. The TCK for the Java platform as a whole (excluding individual JSRs) was *never* free but rather licensed by IBM, Apple and others for a considerable sum. Apache maintains Sun changed the terms but I'm not convinced that beneath all the legal mumbo-jumbo regarding the JCP that there was clear agreement on a royalty-free TCK for Java SE.

I'm not condoning the actions of Sun/Oracle but the position should have been clarified and a specific perpetual binding agreement reached before a single line of code was written. Instead, development ploughed on *for several years* without an agreement - hoping Sun would 'come around' eventually.

Now the corporate backing has dried up, any independent contributors have the right to feel aggrieved. But aggrieved with whom? Did IBM and others ever negotiate with Sun on Apache's behalf for TCK-licensing before commencing development? If not, was it a wise decision for the Apache board to endorse a second clean-room implementation when GNU Classpath was well on the way, albeit with a non-Apache license?

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[ByteSlicer]

They seem to think they can skip step 3 ???? and go stright for 4. profit.

There is no step 4. Step 2 is the ? step, step 3 is Profit!

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Jason Earl]

People that think Microsoft is more evil that Oracle simply haven't been paying attention. Oracle is basically suing Google for cloning Java. Microsoft has actually *helped* Novell clone .NET.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[ToasterMonkey]

I don't know the answer to that, but I do know this: there is a *lot* of Java out there, being served by Apache based servers. From a strictly business standpoint, Apache is in a good position to know what devs want. And by extension, they know what businesses want. Oracle would be foolish to lose that expertise and insight, to what is a huge market.

Really, what kind of relationship does Apache have with its customers? I think the assumption that Apache knows what businesses want is not based on sound reasoning. It's in the same vein as say for example .. "Linus knows what businesses want because most of them use Linux" which is provably crap.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[jamesrskemp]

http://tomcat.apache.org/

Yes, that is the first result on Google for the search 'tomcat.'

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[thanasakis]

Except Solaris, what else was under CDDL? Some other pieces of software were under the GPL if I remember correctly.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Bruce Perens]

Go is compiled, so it kind of misses the entire point.

Well, this would have been an important point if we were running Java on clients. On servers, all of the energy spent on JIT and so on is useless, because we can compile the code and IMO should.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[marcosdumay]

"However, since Sun was a techie darling and Oracle has long been seen as a villain within the community..."

Rarely a worldwide community agrees on an opinion about something without a cause. Just think about it for a while.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[HiThere]

Two options to consider are Vala and Go. Neither is quite ripe yet, but both are quite interesting.

If you're doing a different kind of application, think about Python. But Python is slow compared to Java, while Vala is fast. Go ... I'm not sure. The documentation is a bit impermeable. And the Vala documentation seems to assume that you already know all about using GObject. Sigh. Nothing's perfect.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Xtifr]

Actually the CDDL, just like the BSD license, is considered by "most people" to be MORE open than the GPL.

Most people? Where do you get your stats? The Institute of Asspullery? I doubt if most people know or care about the difference. In fact, most people probably think that closed-source freeware is basically the same as public domain.

In any case, you're committing the logical fallacy known as argumentum ad populum . It doesn't matter how many people consider one or the other license to be "MORE open". What matters is the facts. And the facts ain't so strong for either side of this debate. (Which is why I argue either side with equal abandon, depending on who I'm talking to.)

Basically, the main counterargument is that the freedom to deprive others of their freedoms is not necessarily a valid freedom. It's hard to argue that a society which allows its citizens the freedom to enslave one another is more free than one which prohibits slavery, even though the latter lacks the "freedom to enslave".

Of course, the "freedom to make proprietary derivatives" is not quite the same as the "freedom to enslave". But it is in opposition to the "freedom to tinker", which makes the "BSD/CDDL is more free" argument at least as dubious as its opposite.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[saleenS281]

Most people? Where do you get your stats? The Institute of Asspullery? I doubt if most people know or care about the difference. In fact, most people probably think that closed- source freeware is basically the same as public domain.

The same place the OP did. Is it your reading comprehension or your memory that caused your inability to remember what you read 30 seconds before you read my post?

In any case, you're committing the logical fallacy known as argumentum ad populum . It doesn't matter how many people consider one or the other license to be "MORE open". What matters is the facts. And the facts ain't so strong for either side of this debate. (Which is why I argue either side with equal abandon, depending on who I'm talking to.)

Basically, the main counterargument is that the freedom to deprive others of their freedoms is not necessarily a valid freedom. It's hard to argue that a society which allows its citizens the freedom to enslave one another is more free than one which prohibits slavery, even though the latter lacks the "freedom to enslave".

Of course, the "freedom to make proprietary derivatives" is not quite the same as the "freedom to enslave". But it is in opposition to the "freedom to tinker", which makes the "BSD/CDDL is more free" argument at least as dubious as its opposite.

I'm not making any logical fallacy. I even put it into quotes for you. All that time wasted typing. *WHOOSH*

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[hey!]

The lawsuit I'll grant you, but no company has a moral imperative to support any open source project indefinitely. That's a big part of what made me an open source advocate, because of the number of *closed* source products that had the plug pullled and left all their customers twisting slowly in the wind.

I'd say that if a company decides its not in its economic interest to continue sponsoring a project, that's their prerogative. It's nice if they do it in an orderly way that gives customers a path forward and contributors a chance grant source code for the latest builds and organize a fork.

Oracle is a nasty piece of work in my opinion, but I can't fault them on how they handled OpenSolaris. They just stopped doing binary releases. They continue to cooperate with upstream projects and they even say they're going to release Solaris source code under CDDL when they do binary releases, although you can't get nightly updates anymore.

I read that as them telling the community that they don't want to be married anymore. That's sad and its understandable if the community feels betrayed, but Oracle hasn't tried to drive a stake through the community's heart so far as I can see. They intend to keep sharing code, they just don't want any kind of joint custody of the development process.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Anonymous Coward]

Not much has changed? Programmers have forked OpenSolaris, programmers have forked OpenOffice, and now Apache is forking "Open" Java.
So, just like Linux (a pseudo fork/rewrite of *nix), we'll have a usable free version in what? 12 yrs? (think about it, Fedora 10 is waaaay better than Debian 2.0, then again, Solaris 2.6 Debian 2.0, or even Redhat 4).




Yes, I do remember Slackware Linux 1.0...

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Daniel Phillips]

Was it ever a good idea for Apache to participate in Java in the first place, knowing that the exact situation that they are complaining about today existed when they started, and has existed for the entire time they've been developing?

Yes it was, it forestalled Microsoft's evil designs. Now that Microsoft's power is largely broken it is time to break the power of those trolls who would attempt to collect toll on Java the language. It is time for the open source community to make a clean break with Java the platform. It always was and still is a crappy platform anyway. Java the language isn't that bad.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[marcello_dl]

Because it needed to market it as an alternative to the multiplatform java. If .NET became dominant you'd see the extend and extinguish phase.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[marcello_dl]

> Actually, I wanted folks to think about why .NET was also not a good idea.

Problem, slashfags?

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Anonymous Coward]

does the java VM suffer from all the intellectual property problems of the language? if not maybe scala would be an option too? It would allow phasing out stuff incrementally, I guess.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Blakey Rat]

Well, this would have been an important point if we were running Java on clients.

People don't run Java on clients (generally) because Java sucks ass at GUIs. C# doesn't, and has about equal distribution on servers and clients. Thus my point that whatever replaces those two has to not suck ass at GUIs.

But frankly, if all you care about is servers, then yes, there's really no issue-- there's already a kajillion environments that run on servers, many of which have close-to-feature-parity with existing Java/C# environments. I'm be more focused on creating an environment that's good at GUIs, and let the server stuff follow at its own pace.

On servers, all of the energy spent on JIT and so on is useless, because we can compile the code and IMO should.

A major fallacy in the Linux world is people responding to "Linux doesn't have a way of doing X" with "you don't need to do X." Regardless of your opinion, and with all due respect, thousands or millions of businesses have decided that Java/C# are ideal for their needs.

You'd be an idiot to:
1) Assume all of those developers/businesses are morons who have no basis for preferring a bytecode environment
2) Dismiss their situation out-of-hand by saying something like "you're doing it wrong"-- that's not going to win any friends

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[minor_deity]

Err... so which part of "closed source" is the GPL software?

The GPL allows you to use someone else's code with the proviso that you license your code under the GPL as well. Don't like those terms? Don't use GPL'd code.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Bruce Perens]

If we look back at when enterprise web development picked up Java, it was at a time when Sun made much of the hardware those shops were already running and was seen as a big winner in both their hardware and software initiatives. Large companies were just bringing up their first web presence, and they turned to Sun for help. Sun sold them both hardware and a platform, and got them going. The language and the platform were second in importance to that, and run-anywhere (they didn't have JIT back then) was of tertiary importance or lower.

It's a different environment today. If you're working on something that runs a GUI better, and develops faster, that's great. I hope you don't feel obligated to tie it to a big virtual machine environment. And you should consider not making it interpretive, too. There's a big open space to explore there.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[sjames]

Reputation means an awful lot. Sun had a rep for being somewhat forgiving in their license terms, Oracle has a rep for giving no quarter. They proved it by suing Google over Java. A big thing has changed. The people who own Java have gone from a company known for being fairly reasonable and willing to talk to one well known for a "my way or the highway" "negotiation" style.

Sun wasn't by any means perfect, but at least it had a track record of successful cooperation with an open community. Suddenly it looks a lot more dangerous to bet the farm on the continued openness of anything from Sun now that it's Oracle.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

But Microsoft pays royalties to Sun/Oracle for java patents in .Net. What do you think will happen if anyone actually starts using Mono on the same scale as Android?

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Blakey Rat]

If you're working on something that runs a GUI better, and develops faster, that's great.

The exact point I'm trying to get across is that thing does not exist. C#/Mono is the closest we have to "that thing", and it's unacceptable due to patent threats.

That would be great. If it existed. Until it exists, you can't really tell people to move off Java/C# because there's nothing to move *to*.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[epee1221]

The lawsuit I'll grant you, but no company has a moral imperative to support any open source project indefinitely.

General vexation on the part of the Java community does not require a violated moral imperative. Whether it is evil or not, the decision to drop OpenSolaris tells people something about Oracle's attitude towards the community. Having no moral obligation to do something does not give one a free pass with regard to others' perceptions.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[SplashMyBandit]

Ahh. Thanks for clarifying. Your original post was ambiguous and, as always, was read as being a strange statement.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Jason Earl]

I suppose that it is possible that Microsoft is simply waiting for .NET to become even more popular before they swoop in on the unsuspecting Mono users (all 12 of them). Still, Microsoft has already put patent guarantees in place that would make an Oracle-style assault on Mono much more difficult. I understand that Microsoft's promises are not complete, but they would probably be complete enough for what Google is doing with Android.

Besides, your argument still basically proves my point. Apparently the worst that Microsoft could do to Mono is what Oracle *has already done* to Harmony.

Actually, that's not really a fair comparison. A huge part of the reason that Java has become so popular is thanks to the large repository of quality Free Software libraries, licensed under very permissive licenses, that the Apache Foundation shepherds. I would bet that you can not find a single Java application, more complicated than "Hello World" that does not use an Apache library or tool. The Apache Foundation is a big deal in the Java world, and Oracle is basically telling the Java community that Apache code is not safe to use.

Comparing that sort of action to what Microsoft might potentially due to Mono, a .NET clone and a set of .NET libraries that hardly anyone cares about, is pretty ridiculous. Even if Microsoft did go after Mono it would not be nearly the story that Apache leaving the Java Community is. Oracle's attack on The Apache Foundation and Harmony is basically a worst case scenario for Java. Microsoft would have to sue the Mono project and start clubbing baby seals to top it.

And remember, that's still assuming that Microsoft would be stupid enough to sue the Mono project. It has not sued Samba or Wine, both of which are arguably more central to Microsoft's real business.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[shutdown -p now]

The obvious difference with .NET is that at no point it has been, or was claimed to be, open.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[shutdown -p now]

C++/Qt combo - if you restrict yourself to Qt classes only, and use their object model for your stuff as well (so you get reflection etc) is surprisingly Java-like. It misses tracing garbage collection, but it's less of an issue there because many common types (e.g. strings, collections) simply implement the standard C++ copy semantics, and for other cases there are smart pointers. Still have to look out for reference cycles, but in e.g. C# you just as well have to look out for sneaky delegate / event handler references, and in Java, for anonymous inner classes parent references. There's no silver bullet for memory management, and smart pointers are reasonably good in practice.

It's not JIT-compiled bytecode, but for desktop/UI side of things, I think it's not a definite requirement. It makes for some nice possibilities in the realm of runtime code generation and nice debugging convenience tricks (such as how .NET disables JIT optimizations if you attach a debugger), but it's not something strictly necessary.

The only annoyance is that the language is still C++, and refactoring is still very hard to automate. Ironically, now that Visual Studio has a complete, full-featured C++ front-end (EDG) in its C++ editor, which can properly parse and understand arbitrarily complicated language constructs (templates etc), its future versions will probably be the first C++ IDE to support completely foolproof refactoring of C++ code, to the extent it is possible given language constraints.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[SpaghettiPattern]

... Apache is in a good position to know what devs want. And by extension, they know what businesses want.

Ever worked for a corporation with half a decent IT architecture dept? Apache servers are tolerated at best and are not part of the process of making money. What corporations want is a product supported by a vendor and they are prepared to pay top bucks for that. That is, either BEA Weblogic or IBM Websphere.

Not to knock Apache -they make many a dev's life happier to live- or any other community effort, but to shine a realistic light in the whole.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[rtfa-troll]

So, once again, we see clearly what you are talking about. First you want the corporation to have the right to restrict what other's do "A corporation should have the right to produce closed-source software" and then you talk about other people's code and don't want to give them the right to limit what happens to that.

In other words, you feel you have a god-given right to take from others but that others should not be allowed to get from you. It's precisely for people like you that things like the GPL, the police and the legal system have to exist.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[kaffiene]

Go is awful. Have actually looked at the design? It's hardly a step forward from C++

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[pangloss]

Oracle's attack on The Apache Foundation and Harmony is basically a worst case scenario for Java. Microsoft would have to sue the Mono project and start clubbing baby seals to top it.

So we're just waiting for the suit now? http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101206/ap_on_re_as/as_new_zealand_seals_clubbed.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[kaffiene]

*sigh* Slashdot and the anti-java community are continuously getting it wrong regarding the value proposition offered by Java. Look, I hate Oracle as much as anyone else out there, and I'd move from Java if I could find something else that works the same way but there;s NOTHING out there to move to. A replacement needs:

(1) A performant VM. The efficient and portable GC, Concurrency and threading features all rely on the consistent memory model afforded by the VM. The .NET CLR is not as efficient (HotSpot eats the CLR's lunch)

(2) A language that is reasonable simple, clean and unlikely to blow your foot off (c.f. C++)

(3) A huge suite of libraries all the way from free and open source to enterprise grade commercial offerings.

To my mind, a language designed with an open definition and an open source reference implementation targeting a performant VM would be excellent and a reasonable replacement to Java. But that language and VM do not exist, as of yet. I mean, there's Parrot, but that's nowhere near fast enough.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but it's you who needs to work on your reading comprehension. His post was perfectly clear to all people who can understand the context.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[u17]

Arguably, the JVM is worth much more than just the Java language. We already have a VM that can run programs written in multiple languages, and has tools to make developing new languages easy: Parrot. The last time I checked, it was still slow and incomplete, but has already come a long way. Eventually it could become the Free Software JVM replacement. Perhaps those who are looking for a project to contribute to should think about this one.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[isorox]

So you can take GPL code
Yes
link it with your own
Yes
modify it
Yes

By this stage, you don't need to do anything else. No need to release the source of anything, keep copyright notices intact, or anything.

distribute it

Yes, you can do this

and you don't have to re-release the source (taking it closed source)?

Anyone you distribute your code too has to have the same rights that you had when you received your GPL code. The GPL ensures that the freedom you get is passed on to others.

It's civilised freedom, c.f. your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[saleenS281]

So, once again, we see clearly what you are talking about. First you want the corporation to have the right to restrict what other's do "A corporation should have the right to produce closed-source software" and then you talk about other people's code and don't want to give them the right to limit what happens to that.

That's a stellar job of making up a scenario which fits your twisted world view. A corporation producing closed source software isn't restricting anyone. You are free to buy their product or not.

I don't really give a shit what your ideals are, or your religion, it's not my problem. You believing it's "unfair" for a company to not release source isn't a restriction or an impediment on any right you have. You don't have a right to live in my house, and you don't have a right to anyone's source code.

In other words, you feel you have a god-given right to take from others but that others should not be allowed to get from you. It's precisely for people like you that things like the GPL, the police and the legal system have to exist.

That's humorous. You think you have the right to take someone else's hard work, stealing their code, and you're casting stones. How ironic. It's precisely people like you, who feel entitled to something you didn't create, that are the reason we have police, and legal system, and the BSD license.

It is my god given right to build something from someone else's work, and not share it with them, yes. When I build a house, I dont' give the logger who cut down the trees free reign of my house. The miner who mined the ore to make the nails doesn't get to use my house as a weekend getaway. They get paid for their product or work, and that's it.

As for not giving anything back, who the hell do you think employes and/or pays for the majority of the BSD coders? They aren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. Get a clue.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Blakey Rat]

No. Just no

You're completely missing the mark. If you think C++/QT is anywhere even remotely close to Java, then you're out in la-la-land and have zero practical experience in this area. (Also, your mind would be blown away by C#, which is *better* than Java.)

Let's set a couple base rules here:
1) If there's no automatic memory management, no.
2) If the GUI builder tools suck ass, no. (Admittedly QT is better than Java's current ones, but nowhere close to C#'s.)
3) If the language is a complex ball of obscure features that takes 5 years to become proficient at, no.

It's just so frustrating... look, if you want people to move from Java/C# to something else, you need something else! This should be extremely "duh" common-sense, but so many people in this thread are missing the point.

Your goal: get people to stop using Java/C#

Solution A: Have an environment as good or better than Java/C#, which is free and has no patent conflicts
Solution B: Bitch and moan on Slashdot

Which of those solutions do you think is going to be most effective?

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Bruce Perens]

The parallelism paradigm is pretty good. What don't you like?

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[ScrewMaster]

http://tomcat.apache.org/

Yes, that is the first result on Google for the search 'tomcat.'

Only because Google probably knows you. If you were a nine year old, you'd probably have gotten something like this, or if you're a military pilot, you might have gotten this.

But Google must know me too, because I got the same link you did.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[ScrewMaster]

or is there a mandate from the top to regress?

Considering who's at the top, I'm going to go with "Yes".

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[fishbowl]

You didn't say anything about distribution before. The license doesn't even take effect until you have distribution, but since you're trolling, you knew that.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[rtfa-troll]

That's a stellar job of making up a scenario which fits your twisted world view. A free software author producing GPL software isn't restricting anyone. You are free to use their software or not.

I don't really give a shit what your ideals are, or your religion, it's not my problem. You believing it's "unfair" for a free software author to not to allow me to link to and copy his code isn't a restriction or an impediment on any right you have (sic). You don't have a right to live in my house, and you don't have a right to anyone's source code.

There. FTFY. Of course I can go on from here and your arguments become stupider and stupider, but let's just give a bit more clarity:

When I build a house, I dont' give the logger who cut down the trees free reign of my house.

That's because you pay for the wood. You make a clear and fair exchange for that and then you own the wood. It being your wood, nobody cares what you do with it, even make a bonfire. Unless of course you stole the wood, in which case the logger may well claim the house if he finds out. Of course, if someone loans you wood or metal for example scaffolding to help you build your house, you have to give it back in the state you acquired it. Different contracts for different situations. I think almost everyone here understands that.

Now; what's how can I be for that and at the same time be anti proprietary software? Well, firstly, in my case, that's a simplification. I think that there are some places where less code access than the AGPLv3 demands might be reasonable. Secondly, for me, it's not about the exact details, more about the implied contract of copyright. Software without source code is long term pretty useless. Copyright is designed for literature which doesn't need a maintenance process. I think that there should be no copyright on works which don't have an indefinite guarantee of maintainability even if the support company disappears completely. Proprietary software is fine for me as long as it either provides that or can survive without legal protection.

As for not giving anything back, who the hell do you think employes and/or pays for the majority of the BSD coders? They aren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. Get a clue.

Having seen the situation where companies used BSD code and then realised that it wasn't a good idea to contribute back just because of the license; knowing about the relative contributions of RedHat to Linux and Apple to FreeBSD I'm really not sure this is the direction you want to go in in this argument.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[shutdown -p now]

Note that I was not talking about a general-purpose Java replacement, but about something that's good enough for client-side UI. I'm not at all convinced that you need a VM for that. You definitely don't need a VM for "consistent memory model".

As for VM efficiency - yes, HotSpot is better, but in practice this is offset by inefficient coding promoted and even forced by Java itself (lack of user-defined value types, lack of generics of primitives, virtual dispatch by default etc). End result is that JVMs have to be better to match the same perf, because e.g. they need to do escape analysis to stack-allocate throw-away Point objects, while in .NET it is inherent in Point being a value type.

Regarding "simple language" - many would argue that Java is too simplistic, especially in 2010. It may have been adequate in 1996, but language design evolves. As for C++ being what it is - it's perfectly possible to use only the subset of the language such that you get something very close to Java. That's precisely what Qt does.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[shutdown -p now]

I was specifically talking about UI development. I would like to point out that, to date, C++ is used more there than all managed languages combined.

You're completely missing the mark. If you think C++/QT is anywhere even remotely close to Java, then you're out in la-la-land and have zero practical experience in this area. (Also, your mind would be blown away by C#, which is *better* than Java.)

I know all three, though I know C# better than most (being a Microsoftie). I've been doing UI development for the last eight years. I do rather enjoy doing it in C# and WPF when I have the chance, but Swing is meh, and most of C++ frameworks are horrible - but not Qt.

If there's no automatic memory management, no.

Smart pointers are automatic memory management. Tracing garbage collection (a la C# & Java) is only one form of such management.

If the GUI builder tools suck ass, no. (Admittedly QT is better than Java's current ones, but nowhere close to C#'s.)

I didn't use the one in Qt Creator all that much, but it's definitely very reminiscent to Visual Studio WinForms designer (actually, the whole Creator is similar in many ways - heck, they even copied the keyboard shortcuts!). So I'd call that a draw.

On the other hand, when it comes to WPF, you get crappy output if you use the designer, anyway. If you want properly reflowing UI, you pretty much have to code the markup by hand. Which is pretty easy with XAML, but there's no base for comparison with visual designers then...

If the language is a complex ball of obscure features that takes 5 years to become proficient at, no.

Getting fully proficient at C++ takes more than 5 years. We actually don't know how many, yet, because most of C++ committee members run into new obscure corner cases every now and then :)

But then C# also has plenty of corner cases (do you follow Eric Lippert's blog)? And Java has its share. The point is that you have a coding style guide which restricts the language to its sane subset. And there is nothing precluding you from doing the same with C++. Qt is a very good start there - their object model (for QObject-derived stuff) is essentially the same as Java/C#.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that C++/Qt is a perfect replacement. I'm not saying that a new language, designed from grounds up along Java/C# lines to be a replacement, wouldn't be significantly better. But there's no such thing, and FOSS community being what it is, you'll get a dozen various projects that will never take up without corporate backing. In the meantime, Qt really is the best FOSS can offer in that department (and it has Nokia behind it, so its future is more certain that that of many other things). And it actually is good enough for many things, one of them being your typical UI client app.

Your goal: get people to stop using Java/C#

You'll pry my C# from my cold, dead hands :)

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Blakey Rat]

You'll pry my C# from my cold, dead hands :)

Hey, I agree with you. I'd much rather everybody moved to Mono. But I'm addressing people like Bruce who shake in their boots and pee their pants because the Microsoft logo might have somehow been linked to the language somehow a little bit. This whole thread has been more than a little bit devil's advocate from me.

That said, it does make me angry how the open source community will whine and moan about something, but they don't offer anything better. If you're offering something better, and people aren't picking it, then ok! Whine and moan! But if you're not offering anything better, than shut up until you are.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[hexwyrds]

If by .NET you mean C#... http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-334.htm - see the attached Patent statement and it's embedded Community Promise.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but Apache is in the business of doing what they think is good for the development community, so they get to pull the moral highground here. They don't have shareholders. They're doing a good thing. What's wrong with pointing out the bullshit of others?

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[kaffiene]

No exception handling is a killer.

Also, I like being able to write code on a PC and give it to a Mac user and know it will run. I also used to do PC / Unix development on a Linux desktop. Not having to cross compile or compile on multiple different machines is a win.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[kaffiene]

Note that I was not talking about a general-purpose Java replacement, but about something that's good enough for client-side UI. I'm not at all convinced that you need a VM for that. You definitely don't need a VM for "consistent memory model".

You do need to be able to tell pointers from data and it's the fact that C/C++ *cannot* do that that prevents them from implementing GC especially well. The GC collectors for C/C++ are fairly poor and not much better than simple reference counting (which is inefficient and not cache-friendly). The consistent memory model is also the reason that Threading and locking mechanisms used for concurrency can be implemented consistently in Java.

As for VM efficiency - yes, HotSpot is better, but in practice this is offset by inefficient coding promoted and even forced by Java itself (lack of user-defined value types, lack of generics of primitives, virtual dispatch by default etc). End result is that JVMs have to be better to match the same perf, because e.g. they need to do escape analysis to stack-allocate throw-away Point objects, while in .NET it is inherent in Point being a value type.

Utter rubbish. That's pure FUD. I was looking through the results of the Google AI challenge where someone was trying to see wether the LISP programmers were all the best programmers because the competition was won by a LISP programmer. It turned out that, in general, the LISP programmers were pretty good, the C programmers were statistically the best, but the Java programmers ran the whole gammut from best to worst. There were well more Java programmers in the top 10 than any other language.

What this shows is that you can write excellent code in Java or you can write crap. The language does not make either outcome a certainty.

At this point, I'm going to accuse you of sharing the anti-Java language bigotry that pervades slashdot. The things you've said are common myths about Java but simply aren't true in practice. I've used Java for 3D graphics, Ray Tracing and Computer Vision / Image manipulation tasks. I've also done these things in C (which for many years was my favourite tool) and I can assure you that Java performs perfectly well by comparison. The only consistent issue with Java vs C or C++ is that Java will generally use more memory for the same tasks.

Let's look at some of your point:

lack of user-defined value types

Yes, Java lacks structs. So what? That's not an efficiency issue, it's a stylistic issue. Besides which, if you need to marshal data for interacting with a C interface (such as OpenGL) which uses structs, you can allocate memory directly via bytebuffers and marshal the data there.

virtual dispatch by default

That's good OO design. HotSpot effectively inlines methods which aren't overloaded anyway. And, if you explicitly want a method to run as quick as possible and to never be used polymorphically - you use the final keyword. From an efficiency point of view, this is NO different to C or C++ where 'inline' is a hint to the compiler.

Regarding "simple language" - many would argue that Java is too simplistic, especially in 2010. It may have been adequate in 1996, but language design evolves.

It was designed to make the creation of rock solid software easier than it is in C, C++. In that task, it succeeded admirably. It's a great tool for making large, maintainable software systems and minimising complexity. I wouldn't use it for writing printer drivers, hello world programs or scripts, but for most other systems programming it's a pretty good tool.

As for C++ being what it is - it's perfectly possible to use only the subset of the language such that you get something very close to Java. That's precisely what Qt does.

I'm a long time C++ programmer. I like MY C++ code. I hate workin

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[sproketboy]

Exactly. Harmony is duplication of effort anyway since there is already Open JDK.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[shutdown -p now]

I know about ECMA/ISO C# & CLI specs. But they correspond to .NET 2.0, while the most recent release is 4.0.

As well, the standardization process for them has been to pretty much write down what .NET implements after the fact. It's still a standard, but there's no real community participation there, the way there is (or should, in theory, be) with Java and JCP.

Re:Looking at the bigger picture

[mugetsu37]

Was it ever a good idea for Apache to participate in Java in the first place, knowing that the exact situation that they are complaining about today existed when they started, and has existed for the entire time they've been developing?

Except without Apache in the picture Sun might not have been able to release as much of Java under GPL as they did before Oracle came into the picture. Perhaps now work on OpenJDK will see a higher priority than before.

Does Larry Ellison read Oscar Kiss Maerth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why else would he act like he truly believes that intelligence can be eaten?

Well...

[Stregano]

...IN YOUR FACE! Sorry, but that is very on topic, and it is not very often that I can put in your face in all caps. Good Show ASF, good show indeed

Don't worry Oracle

[wiredlogic]

You can always run your Java stuff from WebSphere.

Re:Don't worry Oracle

[ADRA]

I don't get the joke. Oracle owns Weblogic, Glassfish, and I believe one more application server if memory holds true. There's no reason to move to an IBM solution when they have many in house.

Its the old joke

[mlwmohawk]

What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison? God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison.

Seriously, Oracle is an arrogant blood sucking company with its fangs in the fortune 500 markets and government organizations. Oracle DBAs demand a high price, and make sure you can't really escape the vendor lock.

Its a house of cards, really. Oracle on a single system doesn't scale much better (if even) than PostgreSQL on a single system. Oracle's cluster solution is nice, but the expense is crazy. Only fortune 500s and governments can waste that kind of money. I don't know of any "new" business that chooses Oracle.

They are trying to kill MySQL, and while I hope it dies a quick but painful death, PostgreSQL offers far more features and equivalent performance for free. What they are doing with Java is crazy. They don't even know what they have or how to capitalize on it. This isn't like MySQL where it is a direct competitor to their cash-cow, this is a key infrastructure piece that gives them a solid foot-hold in the industry. By suing Google and the actions they are taking now, it just tips the scales a bit more toward other languages and environments and weakens their position.

But, Larry is an idiot. Periodic flashes of brilliance, followed by long periods of narcissistic retardation disorder.

Re:Its the old joke

[interval1066]

"But, Larry is an idiot. Periodic flashes of brilliance, followed by long periods of narcissistic retardation disorder."

Well.... I have a hard time equating people who have made their fortunes the way Ellison has with idiocy. On the other hand, he did build himself a samurai castle for a house...

Re:Its the old joke

[mlwmohawk]

My response to that is this:

If you want to know what god thinks about money, look at the people he gives it too.

Re:Its the old joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Well yes, but look at all the stupid stuff he's done after that :p

(Samurai castle ftw)

Re:Its the old joke

[interval1066]

And my response to that is if you are intent on appealing to mythological beings as models for human behavior analysis then you at least should have the honesty within your self to first realize that anything you can imagine you think you might understand about omnipotent behavior is more than likely very wrong; if such beings existed they would be so far out of your experience there's nothing you'd be able to say about them that would even approximate reality. Even if the Bible were some kind of cosmic "Be back later" note. In all likely hood the note would be written on some kind of formless interstellar plasma that would impart the wisdom of the universe to all who touched it. Not start an argument that most humans seem to feel compelled to solve with a knife.

So lets put the religious theories away, shall we?

Re:Its the old joke

[ozbird]

Oracle DBAs demand a high price because they have to put up with this shit on a daily basis. Frankly, you couldn't pay me enough to deal with Oracle licensing - I'm all for migrating to PostgreSQL on Linux if it will scale and is stable enough.

Re:Its the old joke

[SplashMyBandit]

Ellison was good, but most importantly *lucky* - as are all the billionaires out there. Fortune smiled on him and not on all the other, smarter, just as talented, and people with as good or better competing products. It is hindsight and historical editing that assumes that Ellison has some 'magical' quality that allowd him to get where he was. Sure he's good, but so are many others, and they happened to fall by the wayside due to accidents of history (eg. maybe missing out on the right contracts by a day, or any of a collossal number of uncontrollable factors) which meant they didn't get their snowball to a critical enough mass. Unfortunately you seem to have bought into the whole mythical mystique that is perpetuated about successful (and conversely, unsuccessful) people.

Re:Its the old joke

[Blakey Rat]

If you want to know what god thinks about money, look at the people he gives it too.

Ok; I give. Who is God giving money to?

Does he give out cash or checks? Or maybe bank transfers, I suppose being omnipotent he'd have hooks into that system too.

Re:Its the old joke

[SplashMyBandit]

Lol, yet you venerate Ellison. Sure he's no idiot, but he's not a genius either. Just an alpha male going hard and canny enough to reinforce his circumstances ('luck' by another name). This is neither and exceptional, unique, nor rare talent (although being born in the US at the right time helps a lot - which accounts for some of the scarcity).

Re:Its the old joke

[lakeland]

Two new business examples choosing Oracle... (not really disagreeing, more FYI)

1) Startup that is bankrolled by VC funding. The VC bring in experienced managers, used to working in a big corporate environment and they immediately start trying to recreate a similar environment in the startup. That's across the whole board, DR/BCP, HR forms, etc. not just Oracle.

2) Small company starts to move from data is not important to data is important and the IT guy has no open source experience. He compares the price of SQL Server and Oracle, and at the standard edition level Oracle is cheaper. Later the company grows and needs partitioning - they're not going to migrate to SQL Server enterprise and they're unlikely to have run across EnterpriseDB.

Oh, and one point I would disagree on. I think MySQL's existence is good for Postgres. MySQL strongly focuses on ease of setup / use by beginners and I think that that competition is good for encouraging Postgres to cater for beginners.

Re:Its the old joke

[rleibman]

Bravo!

Re:Its the old joke

[mlwmohawk]

And my response to that is if you are intent on appealing to mythological beings as models for human behavior analysis then you at least should have the honesty within your self to first realize that anything you can imagine you think you might understand about omnipotent behavior is more than likely very wrong; if such beings existed they would be so far out of your experience there's nothing you'd be able to say about them that would even approximate reality. Even if the Bible were some kind of cosmic "Be back later" note. In all likely hood the note would be written on some kind of formless interstellar plasma that would impart the wisdom of the universe to all who touched it. Not start an argument that most humans seem to feel compelled to solve with a knife.

So lets put the religious theories away, shall we?

As a long term atheist, maybe a subtle religious analogy escapes people.

"god" or any sufficiently important mythological figure can often serve as a metaphor. Like the expression "The devil is in the details," there is no explicit belief in any mythological devil. The devil represents evil and disputes.

Similarly, "god" in my post is nothing more than a metaphor for the source of money.

So, in case you missed the point, let me be a little less subtle.

There are many more geniuses who are poor than there are those that are rich. It seems to be a trend that the "jerseylicious" types have money showered upon them, where as good and decent, hard working people struggle.

So, Larry Ellison is rich? So what, look at most of the rich people and you'll see that it says nothing about character or ability.

Re:Its the old joke

[mlwmohawk]

Oh, and one point I would disagree on. I think MySQL's existence is good for Postgres. MySQL strongly focuses on ease of setup / use by beginners and I think that that competition is good for encouraging Postgres to cater for beginners.

I have to disagree with the ease of use statement. I am mystified that *anyone* thinks that MySQL is easier to set up than PostgreSQL.

I mean, jeez

initdb -D /databasepath
pg_ctl -D /databasepath start

Is MySQL even close?

Re:Its the old joke

[Thermick]

Oracle on a single system doesn't scale much better (if even) than PostgreSQL on a single system. Oracle's cluster solution is nice, but the expense is crazy.

Yep. I just have to add that I'm following the development of Postgres-XC (that's "extensible cluster") with more than a small bit of interest because of this, even though they're still missing quite a bit of functionality that'll be required for a 1.0 release. Even the improvements to the replication solution they delivered in 9.0 (that "Active Data Guard"-ish thing) that they've got planned for 9.1/9.2 is tickling my interests since it'll mean that PostgreSQL will have a good solution to things where previously the crazy expensive Oracle solutions were the only really nice ones.

Re:Its the old joke

[marcosdumay]

Some people are smart only up to the time they become rich. Then, they slowly discover they don't need to think anymore, and forget about that thinking thing.

That normaly happens to arrogant people. (the ones that are arrogant after becoming rich, it doesn't matter what they tought when poor.)

Re:Its the old joke

[StikyPad]

Nice repartee, John Kerry.

Re:Its the old joke

[walterbyrd]

Its a house of cards, really. Oracle on a single system doesn't scale much better (if even) than PostgreSQL on a single system. Oracle's cluster solution is nice, but the expense is crazy. Only fortune 500s and governments can waste that kind of money. I don't know of any "new" business that chooses Oracle.

Is the RDBMS that oracle customers want, or is the stuff that runs on that RDBMS, like Oracle EBS?

Re:Its the old joke

[Anonymous Coward]

anything you can imagine you think you might understand about omnipotent behavior is more than likely very wrong;

So naturally we should defer to your superior understanding about omnipotent behavior?

Everyone should believe in something.
After reading your post, I believe I'll have another drink...

Re:Its the old joke

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Wow, that is the best argument for the existence of God, that I've ever read form someone trying very hard to pretend He didn't exist. Except the very end where you contradicted yourself by trying to assign your logic to God.

Re:Its the old joke

[Anonymous Coward]

./mysqld_safe &

You were saying?

Re:Its the old joke

[interval1066]

I believe in knowledge. Belief in myth is only useful if its understood in that context. Mistaking myth for reality is both a personal blinder and lifesaver with a loose tether. Possibly comforting, ultimately useless.

Re:Its the old joke

[interval1066]

Please. If you believe in God, go forth and continue to be comforted in your delusions. I don't need to try hard to believe the things I do. But you can mis-characterize my thoughts all you want. I really don't spend much time thinking about things I've already figured out. You, however, I'm glad I was able to get you thinking.

Re:Its the old joke

[interval1066]

"As a long term atheist, maybe a subtle religious analogy escapes people.

You can be subtle and think you are clever, I hope you are comforted by your own cleverness. Sometimes however you are so subtle and clever you're the only one who knows it. Blunt as a brick usually brings all doubt to a quick halt, as I have done here. Rather than mock me you might take a queue.

Re:Its the old joke

[interval1066]

In all the world and all the people I've met I've never met a larger collection of people whose view on success is at best a bi-polar nonsense than the middle class; the poor talk about getting money anyway they can, I get that. The rich just do what they do. To know thine own nature and all that. The middle class at times venerate success, and loath it. Rich people are either very hard working and intelligent, or loathsome criminals. One thing I know, everyone wants to be successful to some degree. I've stopped trying to understand that dichotomy.

I've found the only real common denominator of all the people in the world I've met (I've been fortunate in that I've visited many parts of the world) the successful ones in the US are by a larger degree successful due to their own hard work and people elsewhere are "successful" due to the circumstances of their birth. I'm not going to argue the point, I just know in my heart that it's by and large true.

Re:Its the old joke

[mlwmohawk]

"As a long term atheist, maybe a subtle religious analogy escapes people.

You can be subtle and think you are clever, I hope you are comforted by your own cleverness. Sometimes however you are so subtle and clever you're the only one who knows it. Blunt as a brick usually brings all doubt to a quick halt, as I have done here. Rather than mock me you might take a queue.

Well, at the risk of sounding "elitist," because we all know that clever or knowledgeable people are bad and not real americans. I happen to like subtlety, irony, and wit. Thus, I will not be "blunt as a brick," because, lets face it, anyone can be blunt. G. W. Bush was very blunt.

Re:Its the old joke

[SplashMyBandit]

You don't consider that to be born in the US is as large a lucky happenstance as to be born into nobility in times past? Only a small percentage of the world is born in the US and the ability to do business in the US (ie. residency) is a huge factor in global success. Again, a significant proportion of the world's population does not have this opportunity irrespective of how smart/talented they are. Ellison is no idiot, but again, *circumstances* put him where he is even more than his own abilities. There is an old pilot saying, "I'd rather be lucky than good". Think it through as to why it might be so - it applies to business as well. So please don't buy into corporate chief veneration.

Incidentally, since I come from a neutral/harmless country I've also been to very many places in the world - so that doesn't make your argument any more valid. I've had the opportunity to chanced upon people (eg. Hezbollah in Lebanon - who I'm actually not fond of but Lebanon is great; or Cuba, where they party a lot; to the US, a lot, etc) so have seen and heard a wide spectrum of views. Since I have seen a chunk of the world too and realize how fortunately my own circumstances are - it is a shame that people attribute qualities to themselves and others without seeing that you start at different places on a very uneven playing field. Yes, hard work is required, but no amount of hard work could compensate if Larry Ellison's 'soul' (if he has one, lol) was born in Mogadishu, for example.

Re:Its the old joke

[Anonymous Coward]

You sir, yes you...off the high horse buddy.

I don't know why you felt the need to indulge in intellectual masturbation. The GP may not even believe in God, ever considered that? What he/she is thinking may be so far out of your experience that you have no clue what the subtext is. He/she may just be saying that as a general rule people with lots of money TEND to be less than wonderful people. After all, I DO believe in God and that is still what I took away since I don't know the person.

Honestly, get over yourself.

Re:Its the old joke

[FlyingGuy]

I don't know of any "new" business that chooses Oracle.

Really! Ever heard of SalesForce?

Re:Its the old joke

[interval1066]

You completely missed the point of my reply; your subtle wit was a complete fail. Too subtle for you I guess.

Re:Its the old joke

[interval1066]

"You don't consider that to be born in the US is as large a lucky happenstance as to be born into nobility in times past?"

Hardly, I was given NOTHING coming up, no money, no support, my schooling was not paid for, no scholarship, NOTHING. I now own a home, a business, and am doing well. If I had been born into some kind of nobility I wouldn't expect to have had to work as hard as I've had to to have what I currently have. Your notion seems to be that Americans are gifted with some kind of success right after the womb, and I can tell you from personal experience that the only gift I was given was the ability to do with my life as I chose, not some kind of lottery ticket. I'm sorry you were born in some idiotic kingdom were that doesn't appear to be possible for the common man.

Re:Its the old joke

[interval1066]

"Only a small percentage of the world is born in the US and the ability to do business in the US (ie. residency) is a huge factor in global success.

And by the way, what does this really say about the world? That American citizens have some kind of privilege the rest of the world doesn't? If true, how is that? Not because we are hard working and entrepreneurial? If you imagine that 350 million Americans are some dark cabal of controlling aliens denying everyone else a happy life that would seem to contradict the common (nonsensical) European notion that we're all a bunch of self absorbed idiots. Its got to be one or the other, not both.

Re:Its the old joke

[SplashMyBandit]

Hardworking and entrepreneurial. Yes. Fortunate also due to accidents of history not of the American people's direct making (Europe's Civil Wars and World Wars - which allowed America to ascend past the British Empire and make a colossal profit to boot). I have not problem with America's position, but to say it is all of your own making without considering external circumstances is naiive. America may be eclipsed by China or India this century. The America people are no less hard working or ingeneous than they once were (they're certainly better educated as time goes on) but it is *external factors* that change this situation. To succeed you need hardware and intelligence (Ellison and America have both of these in spades) but also the right combination of exteral factors (it is an AND function not an OR function - which has been my point all along).

Re:Its the old joke

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

First of all, in all seriousness, your first post, is pretty much a exactly what I've heard theologians say in arguing for God's existence.

But secondly, You can't be serious that you don't think about the things you already believe to be true. Leaving the Theism vs Atheism debate aside, how did you ever learn anything with that attitude? I'm sure what you believed about math, language, culture, cuisine, love, work, live and death as a 9 year old isn't the same as you do now. How did you ever do that if you didn't revisit those things which you once believed? Progress of science is dependant on people looking at things the think and imagining for a second, what if ? And then of course applying that hypothesis towards the realm of experiences and seeing if it explains things a little bit better than what came before it.

Re:Its the old joke

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't mind I could rephrase slightly "Oracle's cluster solution is a nice way to get clients to buy more expensive licenses.".
    It really does not scale very well and introduces instability ( high availability solution I don't think so). That's just based on my experience though.

JCP directives

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Serve the public trust
2. Protect the innocent
3. Uphold the law
4. (HIDDEN)

Re:JCP directives

[SiChemist]

Bravo, AC, Bravo!

Re:JCP directives

[snspdaarf]

"Dick Jo.., uh, Larry Ellison! I work for Larry Ellison!"

Re:JCP directives

[Anonymous Coward]

So, all we have to do is get a board director to say "You're Fired", and sit back to watch the bullets fly?

IBM

[Zancarius]

Times like these make me wish IBM had bought Sun instead. At least they're a services company, so they know how that ecosystem works, and their existing investment in Java would've been better for us all...

Question

[Charliemopps]

Can someone thats more involved in Java development give us some insite into what this means for large Java projects that are already well underway? I've got some vested interest in a few software packages based on Java and am slightly concerned about their future.

Re:Question

[M. Baranczak]

In the short term: not much will change. The JDK will continue to be available. The developers will keep working on Tomcat, Hibernate, Spring and so on.

In the medium term, things might get weird. Apache will release Harmony with or without Larry's blessing, the only question is how compatible it will be with Oracle Java. Larry might decide to start charging money for Java. Java will definitely be around, but it's hard to tell in what form.

In the long term, we all die.

Re:Question

[SplashMyBandit]

Java is not going away, ever, so do not fear. It is GPL-ed so no one can take it away. Oracle can steer it towards its own interests but then Apache makes a package that works for your interests.

If you don't like Oracle then use the IBM equivalent. If you don't like IBM then use one of the Open Source equivalents. This is one of the many strengths of Java relative to its 'competitors' (they don't actually compete, since they either don't have as many features (eg. non-standard/poor multithreading in C++) or don't have several independent implementations that are designed to be perfectly compatible (eg. MS .NET and Mono have hugely different [non-portable] libraries)).

Re:Question

[characterZer0]

There are more issues than code copyright. There are patent issues that the GPL does not make go away. Oracle _can_ take it away.

Re:Question

[SplashMyBandit]

Earlier JDK licenses granted a right to develop a compatible implementation. This included a patent grant for this purpose, early in the JDK license. Could not call it Java unless passed TCK though. Java is not going away anytime soon.

Re: The Licensing Picture

[hexwyrds]

I suspect it was neither good nor bad that Apache participated. One good outcome is a ton of AL-licensed core java code implementations, the copyrights of which are not owned by Oracle, and not under their control, easily integrated into most any OSS licensed language.

One bad outcome of the many worthwhile contributions to OpenJDK is that Oracle owns them, they are copyright assigned, and clearly Oracle is not being a good actor in adoption of that code. The whole GPLv2+classpath exception, overloaded with a bevy of patent threats and outright ownership of the code, leaves something to be desired for anyone who champions reuse.

If one were to create the Joe language tomorrow, syntactically different enough from Java and dodging Oracle's patent troves, it would be trivial to adopt all of those AL .jars and extend the language immediately. Not so with the GPLv2 OpenJDK code, forking to borrow the patents is highly suspect, and the code can never be brought up even to GPLv3 and its patent assertions without the owners/copyright holders direct consent.

I sort of view this as a massive failure to the freedom of software perpetrated by Oracle, but no less by the FSF itself, and share my sympathies with all the non-employee contributors to OpenJDK who agreed to copyright assignment. Trusting a foundation such as the FSF with your copyright is one thing, but entrusting it to a for-profit to protect your code for public reuse is a bone headed move.

Of course, all assurances were made by Sun prior to the ASF embarking on Harmony (there was no FoU considerations at that time, that was injected much later in flagrant violation of the JSPA), and prior to their contributing Tomcat to the ASF, that they were moving forwards. Staying with it prior to the Oracle acquisition was questionable, but staying long enough to determine that Sun had polluted Oracle's earlier positions *against Sun* seemed sensible enough. Now that all of this has played out, and the OSS universes of Java, OpenOffice and MySQL all implode, it seems like Apache chose just the right time to exit stage right.

Agreed that .NET is interesting, once all threats of RAND are completely stripped away. MS would be wise to revisit their patent pledges at this time and address their criticisms, it could score them some serious open source credibility in this environment. Especially if they were to contrast themselves to Oracle's JVM ownership. Perhaps the Outercurve Foundation will help to win some of the necessary assurances. Clearly much of the future of computing will exist on portable and multivendor/multi-OSS project VMs.

Java Compatibility Kit

[chris_7d0h]

Fine Oracle, give Apache a JCK already !
Do that and they will have a reason to care about the future of Java.

Too bad Mono isn't more mature

[msobkow]

If Mono were more mature and available on non-x86 hardware, I think .Net would be giving J2EE a serious run for the money over the next few months or a couple years.

Having coded for both, I can attest that .Net is a much cleaner library design, and far quicker to learn. Most importantly, it doesn't introduce drastic architectural changes with each dot update.

Re:Too bad Mono isn't more mature

[characterZer0]

What drastic architectural changes did Java introduce between 1.5 and 1.6 and between 1.6 and 1.7?

Personally I agree with Oracle suing Google

[msobkow]

Google did not deliver a JVM. They pilfered the Java syntax to compile for a different machine. No sympathy.

Re:Personally I agree with Oracle suing Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is perfectly legal.

Re:Personally I agree with Oracle suing Google

[ScrewMaster]

Which is perfectly legal.

Yes. My understanding is that Oracle is suing over trademark issues, but then again, what little I know of the case comes from Slashdot.

Re: Doh

[hexwyrds]

Tomcat is an Apache based server

Anyone who jumped ship from Oracle to MySQL

[Anonymous Coward]

should probably be rethinking that move. Sure am glad I dropped Oracle for PostgreSQL about 7 years ago... And Solaris? not even worth mentioning...

the 'closed' nature of GPL?

[fireylord]

well the only thing 'closed' about the GPL in comparison to BSD licences is the Free Lunch counter (unless you give those downstream in the foodchain the same lunch menu)

Re:the 'closed' nature of GPL?

[hexwyrds]

... and the inability to add new restrictions to the license, al la restricting the Field of Use to General Purpose Computing devices, defined as things which aren't cellphones, netbooks etc.

You *could* get the TCK, pass it, and ship Apache Harmony as Java restricted to PC's and Servers only. The ASF choose not to.

Java Fork

[emil]

It does not appear that Java can be reimplemented because of U.S. software patents, but perhaps it could be forked.

As I understand it, Oracle(Sun) holds patents on Java. However, Oracle has placed the OpenJDK under (some version of) the GPL, granting free use of their patents to anyone working in that environment.

Apache chose not to work with the OpenJDK, but reimplemented the Java standard (in a "clean room" manner?) with the Dalvik virtual machine. Thus, the patent protection of the OpenJDK does not apply. IBM also has a JRE, and I assume that they have licensing on the Oracle patents for their implementation. Apache does not.

Google Android uses a portion of the Apache reimplementation, including Dalvik. Oracle would prefer that implementers of Android pay a license fee for Java Mobile Edition (ME). ME licensing for Android is most likely the reason that Apache has been spurned.

Should Android switch from Dalvik to OpenJDK, the problem goes away. This does not seem technically feasible, as Dalvik performs better with embedded (slower) systems. App store entries would also be in trouble without the LGPL.

Some argue that Oracle has a point in preserving Java purity, but, AFAIK, this is about ME licensing.

Re:Java Fork

[Anonymous Coward]

It's entirely about Java licensing.

Oracle wants Google to pay, and Google doesn't want to pay.

Yeah, I know Google has the rep as being the "good guys" and the fanbois to defend them and Oracle the "evil greedy bad guys" with lots of enmity. But they're both publicly-traded corporations that bow down to the almighty dollar, and Oracle's private jet is a bog-standard business jet. Google's is a Boeing 767.

And never forget Google is a glorified ad agency. (Fighting with phone companies over net neutrality - can't they BOTH lose?)

Re: Java Fork

[pavon]

You have some of the details of the situation wrong:

There are two main parts of a Java runtime, the virtual machine, and the standard library. The OpenJDK project encompasses both of these items, as well as development tools. Harmony is Apache's compatible reimplementation of the standard library. It was written before OpenJDK existed, with much of the work done by IBM. Dalvik is Android's virtual machine, which is completely incompatible with the java virtual machine. It is written by Google and it is not related to the Apache project. Both Dalvik and a subset of Apache are used in Android.

Other than that I agree with your post.

It's really, stupidly, simple...

[thehossman]

Bruno Borges said it the most succinctly...

"There is no point helping to write specifications that you aren't allowed to implement"

http://twitter.com/#!/brunoborges/status/13058930657730560

And Brian McCallister explained the full ramifications most clearly...

http://skife.org/java/jcp/2010/12/07/the-tck-trap.html

In Other News

[Z_A_Commando]

Lucy Asks Charlie Brown to Kick Football...Again

I have to do this anonymously

[Anonymous Coward]

I work with Oracle quite a bit and they're pretty bad.

I worked with Sun and their reps for 20 years. They were clueless in a good way. They were just regular guys who would try to help you. Yeah, the company was dysfunctional, but they actually wanted to please you. I could call them weekends and get quotes for stuff, they'd go out of their way to write special deals and do whatever it takes to get the business at a price you could afford.

Oracle, by contrast has a good cop/bad cop approach. Its a way to screw you and charge you extra, but the sales rep keeps his hands clean.

Here's how it works. You get an an account rep, who acts like a regular guy, except he's not. He'll do stuff like "give you a free guy to help you" whose job it is to count licenses, servers, and applications secretly while "helping" you. He then passes that info back to the "inside sales rep". The inside rep (who will be a mystery to you) will say stuff like "Hey, I heard you got a new bigger server with a lot of new processors, is that right?". If you say "yes", he's got you. If you say "no", he'll keep calling until you admit it.

Meanwhile as you're planning on going live, they know the dates, they call the CIO and say "Dude, you're out of compliance. You go live, you owe us another $1M->a zillion dollars". Meanwhile, their licenses is so opaque that you have no idea what you owe them, and they count different licenses different ways, and even if you're a lawyer and a DBMS expert, you can't tell if you're in compliance or not.

The only way to deal with them is refuse their help, whenever the account rep comes in, accuse him of treating him poorly and throw him out. And when the inside sales rep calls you have to say things like "New server? I have no idea. I know the CIO was talking about getting rid of Oracle or something, but I'm not sure. What did you say you do for Oracle again? New application...ha, they never tell me anything. Did you know we already have an account rep here?"

That completely screws with the inside sales rep. Then when the account rep comes calling, say things like "Hey, my budget has been cut 10%, I need you to figure out a way to cut my maintenance bill by 10% or the CIO wants to throw you guys out. I know its crazy, but he's really mad at you". Then you never hear from the account rep again.

I've said this about Oracle for years: Nothing good comes from dealing with them. The only reason, the ONLY reason they stay in businesses is because they have software OEMs who will only support either MS SQL Server or Oracle as their RDBMS. Anybody who willingly gets into bed with Oracle is a fool. If you do get into bed with them, wear a condom.

And I'm not making up a f*ck*ng thing about any of this.

Re:I have to do this anonymously

[yuhong]

I have to do this anonymously

To be clear, were you really a customer? If so, why do you have to post this anonymously?

Re:I have to do this anonymously

[hotfireball]

Not surprisingly, same experience here. Totally agree.

Re:I have to do this anonymously

[boorack]

Agree. I've seen Oracle reps behaving exactly like this. Luckily, I never had to deal with them directly, (just been an observer) and I hope I'll never have to.

But hey! Kicking out Oracle boxes and replacing them with, say, PostgreSQL (+adapting applications) seems to be a pretty good business for an independent consultant or a small company.

Re:I have to do this anonymously

[FlyingGuy]

Ohh bullshit!

Oracle's licenses are straight up and clear. You either buy per named user or per CPU. If you buy per CPU you can have as many users as you want connected to that machine. Need more Horsepower then you license another CPU.

If you just want to teach yourself Oracle, if you just want to set a system up for a client to do a proof of concept, hell if you want to just TAKE their software with no support, you can download everything they have for FREE all you have to do is sign up.

Oracle Standard Edition One is 180.00 per named user. Annual Support is 39.00

Oracle Standard Edition One is 5800.00 per CPU ( as many users as the machine can handle ) annual support is 1276.00.

There is nothing hidden it is perfectly straight forward. You pay for the product then you pay ( or not ) annual support

If you are at a place in a business when you need the power of Oracle then you know what the cost is really insignificant. If you don't need that kind of horsepower then there are plenty of other options, PostGres, MySQL, MS-SQL, DB2 etc. etc..

Oracle support is 2nd to none and yes it is not free ( what a surprise ) but when it comes down to it, the support is world wide, 24/7/365 and when you pick up the phone you get an actual engineer not some script reader.

You can piss and moan and say whatever you want about LE but when you need massive scalability, rock solid stability and support that is there, when you call for it, nothing beats Oracle.

Re:I have to do this anonymously

[Anonymous Coward]

I would not call oracle rock solid. we had it on a regular reboot cycle for years because it was incapable of cleaning up dead connections.

Re:I have to do this anonymously

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm...if you *need* the power of Oracle as you stated, then Oracle Standard Edition One is not going to cut it, and you know that. Why even mention it? The enterprise edition licensing is much more complicated and expensive. The DBA team is, too.

Re:I have to do this anonymously

[Bigbutt]

Well, technically it's per core not per physical CPU. Oracle changed the pricing model for multi-core vs physical processors which killed our interest in upgrading our Sun hardware. We're moving our gear to commodity x86 hardware and virtual machines instead.

One interesting thing is that putting Oracle on a VMWare virtual machine results in a license for every core on the system, not the cores used for the VM but putting Oracle on a Sun virtual machine results in a license just for the cores used in the VM. It's because under VMWare, the guest OS can request additional CPUs when needed however under Sun, the cores are locked at the amount allocated.

[John]

Re:I have to do this anonymously

[FlyingGuy]

Show me the e-mail from Oracle Support specifically stating that was the only way to solve that problem or it didn't happen

Re:I have to do this anonymously

[FlyingGuy]

Well, technically it's per core not per physical CPU

Yep that is true, but if you look at their example in the licensing document. A Dual Socket machine supporting quad core Xeon's would be: 8 * .25 = 2 CPU licenses. Not bad for a machine that has the equivalent of 8 CPU's and if run in hyper-threading mode actually looks like 16 CPU's to a Linux kernel.

Re:I have to do this anonymously

[Anonymous Coward]

This poster is a complete asshole. I can't be bothered to pick all the holes in what he said though, apart from this:

"Meanwhile, their licenses is so opaque that you have no idea what you owe them, and they count different licenses different ways, and even if you're a lawyer and a DBMS expert, you can't tell if you're in compliance or not."

If ever there was an admission of stupidity thats it. Leaving aside his inability to match a verb with a plural; Oracle's licence model is non trivial, but if you are too dumb to figure it out, there are day consultants that can do it for you. His main complaint seems to be that he's not allowed to cheat. Well, welcome to business. You sign contracts, then you keep them.

Re:I have to do this anonymously

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you stupid or something?

There's things in this universe called retaliation and blackballing. And you know Oracle is going to sue for libel and slander.

Alienation

[No. 24601]

I think there's a general misunderstanding about what's going on here. So let me try to clear it up (and hope I succeed). As an independent company, Sun was essentially a failing concern. Pure and simple. When Oracle purchased Sun, they purchased them for the assets that Sun happened to own (either through in-house R&D or through either shrewd or lucky acquisition - choose your poison). They did *not* purchase Sun for business strategy. I can guarantee you on that. Thus, there is a new business strategy in place with respect to capitalizing on Sun's assets.

So by this reasoning, the alienation of the OO, MySQL and Java communities is by no means a random occurrence. Oracle's new business strategy with respect to these products is what is alienating these communities. If you want to pretend that Oracle and Ellison are not behind this, either you're simply in denial, you're heavily invested in Oracle technologies, or Oracle writes your paycheque (again, choose your poison).

oh ya, to all those who saw no harm in the Sun acquisition....

Re:Alienation

[ADRA]

To be fair, before the acquisition there were worries that Sun would just start tanking and take with it the ability to support Java in a meaningful way with it. I think the hope with Oracle was that they would actually capitalize the project to make certain that all of their own java based products worked better. Since they are heavily invested in Java based technologies for their own offerings, a better Java == a better product for them to offer. Things haven't turned out so rosy, but that's the position we're in now.

Clueless license users

[hexwyrds]

Of course the GPL doesn't. Contributors to OpenJDK give Oracle their copyrights, and Oracle does whatever Oracle damned well wishes.

And if you wish to become a clueful troll (which I trust you don't)...

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=the+tck+trap

Re:Clueless license users

[rtfa-troll]

I think you maybe posted a reply to the wrong comment. Otherwise, your comment is just a bit too surreal even for me.

There is nothing to make you give your rights to Oracle, however, if you do so, your software is no longer protected by the GPL. That is your fault.

The TCK trap is irrelevant also to the GPL. The TCK trap occurs precisely due to the software elements required to run the OpenJDK which are not covered by the GPL.

So, what are you trying to say?

Re:Clueless license users

[hexwyrds]

If you wish to contribute to OpenJDK, you'll need to execute http://oss.oracle.com/oca.pdf... giving Oracle the right to relicense your code as they see fit.

Since anything not derived (apply Oracle's opinion of "derived") from OpenJDK has no free TCK license, and any TCK you pass causes you to add more restrictions than the GPL license permits... therein lies your trap. Your "Free" Java, isn't.

Re:Clueless license users

[rtfa-troll]

If you wish to contribute to OpenJDK, you'll need to execute http://oss.oracle.com/oca.pdf.

Trying not to be contrary, but if you really want to contribute, load it into GIT; create a project on GitHub and fork it. Take the bits from Harmony needed to fill in the gaps. That's a much more valuable "contribution" than giving things to Oracle.

Also, this isn't "my" Java; I really don't much like the stuff; don't program in it and strongly recommend that anybody that does have to deal with it ports to GCJ rather than using it in a JVM.

So, back on the original topic, this discussion doesn't have much to do with criticising the freedom of GPL software. The OpenJDK binary clearly isn't GPL. Nobody should use it if they can avoid it and if they have no choice they should be thinking about how they can migrate off as quick as possible.

It was?

[SilverJets]

yes, it was unnecessarily hard to buy stuff from Sun due to their crap sales process

It was?

1) Look at sun.com and browse their servers

2) Call Sun Rep. and ask for quote on chosen server and configuration

3) Pass quote to purchasing department and say 'Order 2 of these'

4) Open the boxes that arrived a week later and remove the new servers

Re:It was?

[SplashMyBandit]

Step 2 can be slow - when their sales staff were busy. Everywhere else there is Step 1 = browse servers and order online, goto Step 3.

Re:It was?

[multipartmixed]

Back-in-the-day, Sun refused to sell me some spanky new E450s because they weren't certified to run Sun Cluster. So I had to buy some (cheaper!) Ultra 2s intead.

Of course, the E450s were certified by the time the Ultra 2s arrived, I knew damn well certification was right around the corner, and I needed the hardware a good six months before we had to have the cluster live anyhow.

Then Sun found out that I bought the stuff from my offices in one city, and wanted the stuff delivered to my data center in another. That actually caused a month-long delay on a bunch of the hardware as two Sun "sales regions" fought it out amongst themselves as to who should get the commission.

Jesus, what a pain dealing with those guys was. Now I deal mostly with a used equipment vendor specializing in off-lease crap who will actually sell me whatever it is I ask for. Way easier. I just pick up the phone, tell him what I want, and a couple of days later it shows up at whatever data center I want.

Re:It was?

[SilverJets]

I guess you either had a bad Sun Rep or bad luck. I never had a problem getting a quote from ours in a timely manner.

Don't fear the forker.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fearing forking is so pre spork and github.

Re:Don't fear the forker.

[CptNerd]

Fearing forking is so pre spork and github.

That's... not even English anymore...

It just doesn't fit the profile

[it5complicated]

I'm not sure if "open source" and "oracle" can fit in the same sentence. I mean, English is an emergent language, and it must acquire rules that reflect the current historical trends. I don't know the man, but he seems a raving hedonist.

Clustinger Patents?

[JSBiff]

I have to ask: what are the odds that somewhere in the PostgreSQL-XC development cycle, the pg devs will unknowingly implement the same technique(s) that Oracle used and patented, opening pgsql-xc to oracle lawsuits?

Whenever Free/Open-Source software tries to do something that some proprietary vendor has already done, seems to me there's a relatively high probability that *something* will end up being done the same way, because it's the obvious (or only) solution to the problem at hand.

Re: The Licensing Picture

[Haeleth]

MS would be wise to revisit their patent pledges at this time and address their criticisms, it could score them some serious open source credibility in this environment.

MS will never have serious open source credibility. Their transparent, openly-acknowledged goal is to persuade people that use open source today that they should use proprietary Microsoft products tomorrow. The only reason they have made all these .NET-related patent promises is that they have judged that Mono is more likely to lead to businesses migrating from Linux to Windows than the other way round.

And don't you think that's likely? Most of the businesses that use UNIX or Unix-like servers today still use Windows on their desktop. If they switched from Java to C#, Microsoft would have a pretty good case to make that it would be sensible for them to standardise on a single platform for desktop and server. And the market share of open source platforms would plummet.

The .NET patent threat is overblown, yes. But that doesn't mean Mono isn't a trap.

Re: The Licensing Picture

[hexwyrds]

But that doesn't mean Mono isn't a trap.

I don't disagree, my post suggested MS could remedy these legitimate criticisms now, and gain much of the open source credibility that Oracle has been so ready to throw away. In other words, they didn't do it right the first time, although perhaps they tried. Adopting the critiques of the JCP and Oracle, it would be easy for them to show "see, we wouldn't do that, and we are updating our patent promise thusly ... to ensure that we cannot".

Quran

[Quran]

You are just too good at explaining things! I have found this extremely useful. Please keep us posted

woah there

[fireylord]

what exactly do you think i mean by '(unless you give those downstream in the foodchain the same lunch menu)' ?

basically you cannot restrict downstream any more than you are restricted. How exactly is this 'closed'??