Oracle Could Reap $1 Million For Sun.com Domain

joabj writes "Last week, Oracle announced that it is decommissioning the Sun.com site, which it acquired as part of the $7 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems. So what will Oracle do with the domain name, which is the 12th oldest .com site on the Internet? Domain brokers speculate Oracle could sell it for $1 million or more, if it chose to do so."

Comments

Many domains are worth more.

[Pharmboy]

I just don't see them selling it off right now. It isn't like Larry is broke and needs the bucks. And it isn't like the market for domain names is at a high point. He would get more selling the Sun name, domain, and some minor IP to someone as a set. He has already carved all the white meat off that turkey, which is the customer base and some software.

Re:Many domains are worth more.

[Massacrifice]

They wanna make sure it (the domain) doesn't come back. They wanna make sure those pesky hippies with their open-source sandals and well-engineered hemp shirts go somewhere else, somewhere that is NOT ORACLE. Because to have the PRIVILEGE of being served by an Oracle web server, you should be wearing an Armani suit, a silk tie and matching pointy italian shoes.

Re:Many domains are worth more.

[swordgeek]

Hah! Dead on there.

As one of those pesky hippies who works for a company that owns about 1500 Sun servers, allow me to say that Larry can go fuck himself. When they increased our support contract to $8M/year, we told them to take a hike. We are replacing all of our Sun software, most of our Solaris instances, and much of our Sun hardware in less than two years.

I mourn Sun, but they're dead now. Nobody is going to pay more than pocket change for the sun.com domain. Filthy dirty fucking Oracle.

Re:Many domains are worth more.

[$RANDOMLUSER]

...Larry can go fuck himself...
...Filthy dirty fucking Oracle...

I find your ideas interesting and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:Many domains are worth more.

[rtb61]

Well as an advertising site, they could donate it to NASA (possibly also other space agencies as a joint effort) and sponsor the creation of a web site based all around information about this solar system and promote the peaceful exploration and development of the rest of our solar system. Thus attempt to start creating a better public image.

So would this be worth more to Oracle in terms of marketing than the sale price of the domain.

Re:Many domains are worth more.

[EdIII]

The domain on its own is worth hardly anything without the IP. Any party that is serious about the domain will want no problems with trade marks or IP claims against the use of the domain. Now I hardly think that is going for only a million dollars.

Of course, a business that had nothing to do with computers, software, databases, etc. might not have to worry about trade mark claims as their business might not constitute dilution of the mark (as in the case of Mr. Nissan with Nissan Computers), but I seriously doubt there is going to be a flower or quilting company willing to put up that much cash for a domain.

Domain squatters and their ilk are hilariously ignorant snake oil salesman participating in a shared, almost progressive, delusion of their assets and their worth.

Anybody that is considering even for a second to purchase a domain needs to do a trade mark search first and look for businesses with a name even close to it. It's not like it is unheard of for domains to be "transferred" after a big powerful company pushes a small entity around for the domain with claims of trade mark dilution.

The only real case that I know of where the defendant is not only right, but still winning against all odds, is the aforementioned Mr. Nissan of Nissan.com.

For everybody else in the real, and corrupt, world it's just not worth it to purchase a domain without knowing that you can, and will, be able to defend yourself against claims of cyber squatting and trade mark dilution.

I think sun.com is worth zero dollars on its own for precisely this reason.

Re:Many domains are worth more.

[martin-boundary]

I think sun.com is worth zero dollars on its own for precisely this reason.

The internet is full of links to sun.com from all sorts of web pages that will never be removed. Anyone who owns the domain gets literally millions of link referrals for free.

Re:Many domains are worth more.

[mysidia]

The internet is full of links to sun.com from all sorts of web pages that will never be removed. Anyone who owns the domain gets literally millions of link referrals for free.

Invalidation of those links would hurt people who have purchased Sun's products....

In many cases, those would be links to documentation, downloads, help references, etc.

NBA

[lyinhart]

Eh. They should probably sell it to the owners of the Phoenix Suns NBA team. They'll just redirect it to their official website.

Re:Re

[Massacrifice]

Oracle.xxx would actually make a lot of sense. Considering that their prices and policies are so obscene.

I must have this site...but first...

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the IP Address of the Sun?

Re:I must have this site...but first...

[TheGratefulNet]

use broadcast, 255.255.255.255

even with that mask, you're still visible under the sun.

Re:Worth more to keep it

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Indeed. I can't remember how many roomfuls of students I told to go to "java.sun.com" for all things Java.

Whoopee!

[Anonymous Coward]

$1M. Wow. Imagine what Oracle could do if they had $1M dollars.

Re:Oldest dotcoms

[Marillion]

Microsoft totally missed the Internet. They had their sights set on AOL back when most AOL users didn't care to venture (or realized you could) outside of the AOL garden. It was all MSN all the time. Then they had an "oh shit" moment.

Forget the domain, ask about the IP blocks

[RedLeg]

As the TLDs expand, the value of a ".com", even a sexy three letter one with some history decreases.

Ask instead which (pre CIDR) address block(s) Sun had and Larry E now has. IIRC, they're sitting on at least one "A" and potentially multiple "B"s.

Since "IPv4" is gonna implode this year (yeah, right, but just go with it.....), the IP space is gonna have much more real value.

Red

Bill Gates and the CD-ROM revolution

[mattdm]

Bill Gates's book "The Road Ahead", is, in its first 1995 edition, focused on how the CD-ROM was going to change everything about computers. Remember Encarta? They were really focused on that -- multimedia on discs, that was going to be the future.

But then, for the 1996 printing, the whole thing was re-written and suddenly CD-ROMs weren't the hot thing. It was all about the Internet.

Re:I would use it to be Frist Post!

[darkpixel2k]

Having a domain like SUN.com! Just think of the internet street cred!

Yo dog! I'm at owner@sun.com!

And what would you do with sun.com? Start some sort of internet busin&@!%&*#%OHFUCK I already have a cease and desist letter from Oracle saying they still own the trademark 'Sun' in relation to all computer everything. Your best bet it so open Sun Bakery and sell cook#@&$*!DAMNIT! Cookies are computer related too.

Ok--here's the plan: Step 1: Buy sun.com for millions Step 2: Find out you can't start a computer company named 'Sun' or Oracle will sue you into oblivion. Step 3: Kill yourself because you are millions in debt with a worthless domain name.

Solaris replacement

[Compaqt]

Would you mind telling us what you're replacing it with? RHEL, Ubuntu Server, *BSD, other?

And how have you replicated those nice Solaris features (containers, that debugging thing, the new copy-on-write filesystem), or if they are missed at all?

Re:Solaris replacement

[swordgeek]

Migration in general is going to RHEL. It's been my experience that containers just never caught on in the enterprise world. (I run 'em at home, we've got a few in our lab, but they were stillborn for us and most other companies I talk to.) Dtrace is very handy once in a long while, but only when things go wrong--which they shouldn't.

And that leaves zfs. Rumour has it that RedHat is going to be releasing an incompatibly-licensed ZFS to their customers. I hope it's true, because it is the single greatest step forward in Unix servers since...I don't know. Maybe since NFS or RAID. It's brilliant, and with ZFS-root, it's brilliant squared.
Hell, Solaris is better than Linux in most ways. It's breaking most of our hearts to get rid of it and replace it with a flawed wannabe, but we don't have a lot of choice. Oracle has made Solaris a liability.