Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Oracle Asks Apache To Rethink Java Committee Exit

Posted by kdawson on from the with-sugar-on-top dept.

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.'"

17 of 266 comments (clear)

  1. They reconsidered by Arancaytar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Answer is still no.

    1. Re:They reconsidered by SerpentMage · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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...

      --

      "You can't make a race horse of a pig"
      "No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
    2. Re:They reconsidered by erroneus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:They reconsidered by PCM2 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      Breakfast served all day!
    4. Re:They reconsidered by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      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?

    5. Re:They reconsidered by SplashMyBandit · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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).

  2. Best quote ever. by Pharmboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    '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.

    --
    Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
    1. Re:Best quote ever. by SerpentMage · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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...

      --

      "You can't make a race horse of a pig"
      "No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
  3. King Midas by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  4. Cynical but true... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

    1. Re:Cynical but true... by ozbird · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.)

  5. Looking at the bigger picture by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    --
    Bruce Perens.
    1. Re:Looking at the bigger picture by inode_buddha · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      C|N>K
    2. Re:Looking at the bigger picture by eln · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  6. Re:Question by M.+Baranczak · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  7. It's really, stupidly, simple... by thehossman · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

    --
    -- The Hoss Man
  8. I have to do this anonymously by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.