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Oracle Sues Companies It Says Provide Solaris OS Support In Illegal Manner
alphadogg writes "Oracle is continuing to crack down on companies it claims are providing support services for its products in an illegal fashion. Last week, Oracle sued IT services providers Terix and Maintech, alleging they have 'engaged in a deliberate scheme to misappropriate and distribute copyrighted, proprietary Oracle software code' in the course of providing support for customers using Oracle's Solaris OS. Oracle's allegations are similar to ones it has made in lawsuits against other Solaris service providers, such as ServiceKey, as well as Rimini Street, which provides third-party support for Oracle and SAP applications."
So Oracle is trying to kill off Solaris? Because nobody in their right mind would buy an OS from a company behaving like this.
Post patches and upgrades to a public/semi public website behind a "user agreement." Sue anyone who downloads them in the act of providing third party support to customers who actually do have the right to use the patches and upgrades.
... Oracle continues to make more friends in the business world!
Wait... what? Never mind.
If I'm reading that right, Oracle clams that:
Oracle provides updated software versions for a yearly fee.
Defendants are unlawfully distributing the updated versions to people who haven't paid the fee.
If I'm reading that right, Oracle is being slightly non-generous by having annual payments to get updates. That's understandable, though, it costs them money to keep making new updates.
I see nothing in TFA about Oracle objecting to services the defendants provide, just and objection to them distributing new updates that haven't been paid for. So the headline is a load of bull, right?
How did it pan out the last time?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
they're sales people are legendary, and that's all that matters. IBM doesn't even bother giving IT a thought nowadays. It's all about the sales people. Oracle realized that ages ago.
For all the complaints, the people that matter will still choose Oracle, and techies like you and me will get stuck learning and implementing it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Normally i'm pretty pro-opensource and not really a fan of Oracle. In this case, it looks like they are right here. They do give Solaris for non-prod use for free (sans updates). If you want the updates you need to sign up for a maintenance contract. Flip side, they do douche moves all the time. Case in point I have an old SUN X4500 and wanted the drivers for it. Their website prevents you from downloading these without a "maintenance contract". On what, 8 year old hardware? You cant give a small download away on obsolete hardware?
Regarding Solaris support, Oracle does a pretty crappy job. Support has gone way downhill since the Sun days. Perhaps if they improved their own support they wouldn't need to worry about other companies. I mean, they do have the code, they should be able to provide the support better and less expensive than anybody else. They don't.
Sap:
3. A foolish and gullible person.
Sometimes I get a bit tripped up by bad grammar, but the title of this slashdot article "Oracle Sues Companies It Says Provide Solaris OS Support In Illegal Manner" as well as the link text "Oracle is continuing to crack down on companies it claims are providing support services for its products in an illegal fashion" are both ambiguous as to where the illegality is.
How I read it: "Oracle sues (companies it says provide Solaris OS support) in illegal manner." How I think it's supposed to read: "Oracle sues (companies it says provide Solaris OS support in illegal manner)."
Very subtle difference in how it's read, very substantial difference in how it's interpreted. Either Oracle is filing an illegal lawsuit (which I doubt) or Oracle is filing a lawsuit against companies with illegal Solaris OS support services. Perhaps a better phrasing would be: "Oracle sues companies who allegedly offer illegal Solaris OS support."
(Hm, maybe I should RTFA.)
They're suing people still willing to put up with their stuff.
The illumos project provides the basis for a Solaris-like operating system. Many distributions of illumos are now available, just like Linux. I think OmniOS and SmartOS are particularly worthy of your consideration, and ready for enterprise-scale production use, big data, DevOps, and all the other buzzwords.
Other companies wouldn't have to provide Solaris support if Oracle would provide it. Oracle's support sales team is in the witness protection program.
Go after SCO. You'd feel like you were fighting something, and make us *nix users feel good. About you, and what you're about. Win-win. WHo cares that there's no connection?
Testing drivers, and maintaining testable builds, of 8 year old hardware is quite expensive. I've certainly done so and helped partners do so, but charging real money for supporting such outdated software and hardware is both common and quite reasonable. They're high fees because you have to maintain a full tool suite: hardware, media, backups, patches, and expertise.
this is /. of course the headline is a load of bull...
but the server providers are in the wrong.. regardless of how much someone may hate oracle or their products.. oracle is NOT THE BAD GUY in this case.
But the hardware, software, and drivers were all created and tested 8 years ago.
There is no reason to retest the same drivers over and over again, simply because time has elapsing in the interim.
They built those back when SUN X4500 was brand new. And it cost them nothing to have the drivers sitting in storage for 8 years. Theoretically, someone even had a maintenance contract for that exact SUN X4500, and had those exact drivers on it. When you need a maintenance contract to even use your 8 year old hardware, you don't really own it. You are just leasing the right to operate it.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Find somebody with a Solaris support contract and ask them to download it for you. If I knew you, I'd do it for you (I manage a Solaris environment).
Anyway, what Oracle is probably thinking is that making drivers and software for old platforms available for free would allow someone to continue running their old platform for a while longer. They would rather you either buy an expensive contract to keep your apps running or have you buy newer hardware. Greedy, yes, but not an entirely unreasonable motive.
BTW - Cisco has been doing the same exact thing for years. If you have an ancient Cisco router that you picked up at a garage sale and want to load the latest IOS on there, you're SOL unless you have a buddy with a Cisco support agreement.
The "software" I wanted to download (SUNWhd) hasn't been updated since 04-Nov-2011. Its a small utility to "map" drives to their slots and offline drives.
So, where is this "testing, building, etc" costs come from, storage space on their download servers?
When they sold the gear (new) it was fairly pricey and people paid a small fortune for the maintenance.
All things considered i cant see why they would "guard" this so much.
So if as a consultant I install and show people how to use DTrace on Linux (its available at least for debian systems) and they pay me, would Oracle feel entitled to go after me?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Oracle is more-or-less trying to kill Solaris. Of what new hardware they sell, it's extremely expensive and geared towards suckers with big wallets who don't comparison shop and/or are easily wooed by sales pitches. Otherwise, Oracle is more interested in milking more money out of legacy Solaris users who don't have time/resources to jump ship to x86/Linux (i.e. $50,000/year for maintenance on current Solaris environment vs. $500,000+ to code/port existing applications/buy new solution for Linux). They have no interest in providing "good" support simply because anyone who is STILL using Solaris today is probably doing so for the reason I stated.
People will get off of Solaris eventually, but they have quite a number of years left in which they can greedily milk money away from their install base until Solaris becomes unprofitable to sustain.
He said nothing about needing updated drivers for the latest and greatest hardware. He just wants to download the stuff from 8 years ago.
When I was in university, we used Sparc 1+'s (ick) which my 66 MHz Intel '486 blew out of the water, but they had Solaris, (while I ran Linux). Linux was not seen as impressive enough back then, so they went with what they did. Solaris was the selling point, not the slug-like hardware. I am very glad to see that they ditched this stuff a long time ago. Oracle have done an outstanding job pissing Solaris customers off. I didn't get that big a woodie over Solaris, although I did write software (CS TCP/IP networking labs) that were reasonably cross platform between Solaris and Linux (at the time). Change the paths of two libraries and everything compiles and runs the same (I got a few bonus marks for making the networking software cross/OS). I know there are a few goodies that a few people like in Solaris that aren't in Linux, but they are few, there is dwindling support for Solaris, there are no updates for Solaris, and there is the evil Oracle ready to sue the crap out of anyone using it. Just dump it, Oracle too, and use something else.
Only if you are offering new versions of stuff or offering support of new stuff. The hardware certainly hasn't changed, and as long as you are only offering support/updates for the version of the OS that was current at the time, then the patches/updates/etc. all still work fine.
Now, if someone is using old hardware with newest releases of software, I see a problem with it working, and yes, it would cost some company money to support it - someone would need to write the code or modify the existing. But even then, hardware obsolescence may take care of the issue for you. Windows 7 doesn't need drivers or firmware for a 3com network card plugged into a MCA slot 'cause no computer with MCA slots is capable of running any version of Windows... they could barely crawl with Windows 2.0.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Is Oracle's behavior legal? Yes. Are the support companies in the wrong? Yes. Oracle owns Solaris and gets to set the rules. Is this a smart strategy for Solaris or Oracle? I doubt it. My company was a long term Sun/Solaris customer but when Oracle took over they locked down support and pretty much everything in the Solaris community and started attempting to extract as much cash as they could from us. We weren't the biggest customer but we were a pretty good customer and we weren't a tiny little startup either. Oracle did an excellent job of convincing my management to move to Windows and open source solutions. We stay as far away from Oracle as we can these days. Oracle knows the cost of everything but not the value of a community to support them.
No, the fees are high because it costs a lot to keep Larry Ellison in jets and new Pacific islands. Oracle is a rapacious, money-gobbling machine of a company. Every upgrade, bug fix, OS update, dev or test server costs large money. If you run the database on a VM (besides the one Oracle owns), you have to license for every processor on the VM server, even if your DB only uses one core. They send actual auditors to your site to check your license compliance. They like to "partner" with their customers, such that the more money you make, the more you pay Oracle corporation-- like privatizing taxes.
Their sales force speaks a strange language. I dare you to find out what a copy of Weblogic (oh wait, I mean Fusion Middleware), BI (oh, no that's Discoverer), and a database (errr... 11g? 12c?) will cost, or to come up with how many cores/ processors/ CPU's there are in your server, and which have to be licensed. It's basically gangster language. And once you acquire some Oracle products, you're locked in. Update a server? ka-ching! Operating system update? ka-ching. Upgrading Weblogic forced you into upgrading app server? ka-ching. Adding a service pack to your windows server? ka-ching. Windows update broke the 64 bit keys that your old copy of Enterprise Manager tries to load in the browser? ka-ching.
I like their stuff, but I very much hate their business model.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
Oh you want that installed? That will be X dollars for the license... just me pirate that and pocket the licensing fee as profit.
Its sadly very common.
Best way to stop it is to have a tighter relationship between developers and support companies. Give the support companies some sort of distributor/reseller price break so they can make SOMETHING on the sale. And ideally build some tracking into the whole process such that if some pirated copies show up it leads directly back to the offending company.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
But the hardware, software, and drivers were all created and tested 8 years ago.
There is no reason to retest the same drivers over and over again, simply because time has elapsing in the interim.
Unless you do a kernel update of some kind which could add unexpected bugs that interact with drivers and firmware/hardware in bad ways. Or there's an existing bug in the drivers or firmware but it hasn't been triggered yet, and it could happen because of some otherwise innocuous change in a patch.
Read about the 1990 AT&T 4ESS outage about simple changes can break things. A small C coding mistake in which a "break" broke out out of a "switch" statement instead of an "if" clause caused a nation-wide outage for nine hours.
If any changes/updates are made the entire stack needs to be re-tested. And even then there are no guarantees.
Sounds a lot like Cisco.
Me: Hi Mr. Cisco, I need a Catalyst 4500, how much is it?
Cisco: Sure, fill in this form, send a copy of your last quarterly report, bank statements, and a letter of recommendation from some of your customers, and a sales executive will contact you.
Me: But i only want a switch?
Cisco: Please, we need that information.
Me: Okay...
(weeks later)
Cisco: HI THIS IS COCAINE JOE YOUR OVER ENTHUSIAST ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE, THE PRICE FOR THE CISCO CRS YOU ORDERED IS $3M AND A SUPPORT CONTRACT OF $5M
Me: Hey but I only asked for the price of a Catalyst 4500
Cisco: YES BUT WE HAVE DETERMINED IT WILL NOT MEET YOUR COMPANY'S REQUIREMENTS SO IN ORDER TO SUPPORT YOU WE HAVE TO SELL YOU OUR LATEST AND GREATEST AND MORE EXPENSIVE!!!
Me: never mind, I'll find another vendor.
I especially love it when sales people try to sell you a $50,000 solution for a small business and claim that TCO is always lower. It seems, the higher the up-front cost, the lower the TCO is!
Caldera Group, i.e. SCO lost a huge battle on these same reasons!
Why would Lar Bo want to 'Re-Energize' his Light-Dick to Conquer and Slay the D.C. Patent Kingdom?
???!!!
This sounds just like the cry for archived versions of iOS apps to support older devices. ... at no cost ...
And it's just as ridiculous. If you wanted to keep a copy of the vintage 2008 version of your systems drivers, maybe you should have burned it to a CD.
If you're rolling out changes to the OS, you have to test, no? So I'm pretty sure that if they do have any updates, they do need to do testing. The drivers may have been written 8 years ago, but the other changes they're making are new and still need to work.
That is exactly Oracle's business model these days. They locked down even the documentation unless you have a support contract.
Oracle will only sell you something with a ridiculous support contract, and they won't give you anything for Solaris without one.
There's a reason I was once told by an Oracle consultant that it stands for "One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
How will Larry buy new shoes if he doesn't have this revenue stream?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Recent versions of Java won't run the Java applet some versions of Sun Global Desktop present to the browser. Oracle's solution is to update SGD, which requires an expensive support contract. It feels like legalize extortion. Sure old versions of Java work, but using old versions of Java is just asking for malware. It is kind of sad, Solaris has some features and tools I like. I guess in the future I will hope my org buys nothing from Oracle. Posting anonymously because I don't want anyone from work knowing my slashdot user name. Putting on foil hat now...
But the hardware, software, and drivers were all created and tested 8 years ago.
There is no reason to retest the same drivers over and over again, simply because time has elapsing in the interim.
They built those back when SUN X4500 was brand new. And it cost them nothing to have the drivers sitting in storage for 8 years. Theoretically, someone even had a maintenance contract for that exact SUN X4500, and had those exact drivers on it. When you need a maintenance contract to even use your 8 year old hardware, you don't really own it. You are just leasing the right to operate it.
OK, more mod ups for people who have no idea what they are talking about. Sigh. There is nothing stopping you from running unsupported. We have several V490 in production for a legacy app and a few spares. When something breaks, we swap as needed. There are no OS updates for our version of Solaris, so we just live with it. You see, this isn't Windows where you need constant security patches and updates. It's a rock solid OS, and rock solid hardware. The diagnostics can tell me exactly what is misbehaving, even when the system stays up and keeps running. Windows admins just don't get this.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Now, is this a wise move on their part? Unfortunately, yes. Evil on a par with MicroSoft, International Business Machines and Hewlett-Packard, but not unwise. You don't like it? Neither do I - which I why I stopped actively marketing my Solaris 2.4/2.5/2.6/8/10 skills some time ago. Nowadays when I look for work I look for an incredibly popular flavor of Linux which has a two-word name starting with "R". Still can't argue with their logic - they spend money and time to create software which they intend to sell at a profit. They can't very well make money while letting someone else undercut them with their own product now, can they?
Just a final point - Oracle (and Sun before them) are in business. Their business model is the proprietary software sales/support model. It has worked, it is working and as far as they can tell it will continue to work.
Now, their absolutely worthless technical support combined with their arrogance - these are likely to kill Solaris and SPARC. Not their business model (which is actually pretty much par for the course for the large IT software providers in the game), but their widely perceived inability to provide quick, accurate correct support for their existing (non-database) products.
> Oracle is a rapacious, money-gobbling machine of a company.
No, they're a vast multi-level marketing scheme that happens to sell a database or two as a side venture, and recently bought a product (Java) that doesn't require an army of highly-paid consultants who have to tithe 20% of their income to them in return for mandatory certifications and licensing just to keep it running.
The big "gotcha" with Java is that Sun's license for Java was always pretty nasty, but they generally looked the other way and ignored all but the most egregious violations of it unless you were trying to use it in embedded devices. Oracle, in contrast, intends to enforce it to the letter. The only consolation prize with Java is the fact that most of Oracle's legal leverage over OpenJDK comes from patents rather than copyright, and software patents -- while questionable in most cases -- at least have the benefit of not being de-facto eternal & endlessly extended every time Steamboat Willie is at risk of becoming public domain. So in another 10-12 years, we'll be able to unambiguously do anything we like with Java, as long as it's cleanroom-engineered and called "Bali" or "Sumatra" (the islands flanking "Java").
And all that's fine. But don't be upset when a third party vendor is selling front you the support with the latest patches, and it turns out they're just selling ou copies of _their_ licensed support from Sun, or Oracle. I've had vendors pull that, and get caught, and had to explain to my purchasing department to cancel the check.
Same here. I support open source, I helped write a lot of it. I wrote one package from scratch that was distributed with Solaris. I wouldn't BUY their product, but that means I won't USE it. I wouldn't steal it, as these defendants allegedly did.
I wish Oracle released all of their stuff as open source, but they don't. I expect them to respect the license on my software (GPL), and people should respect their license.
Used to be you could just get at least the security updates, but they made that progressively harder and more expensive. This has been a slow process (hence their reference to "long practice") but some of us remember there was a difference once.
Though oracle does some seriously sneaky mooching off of redhat, so I don't really care for their crying foul here. They've given the example and the reason. In fact, it's oracle so I don't give a flying fsck at all.
I used to work for the Big-O. Bottom-line is king there. That's why I had to quit. I understand the legalise of this situation. However, you have a bunch of folks out there still running Solaris w/o maintenance contracts. And if they don't update the OS with patches, they are vunerable to security hacks which hurts everyone in the long run. I wish Oracle would let folks update their software w/o contracts but that doesn't help the bottom-line and we all suffer for it....
Karma: Bad
Oracle is profitable now, but I wouldn't be surprised if they lose their relevance in the next 10 years. At a certain point, even the PHBs won't be able to justify the costs. Does anyone know if they provide security updates without a support contract? If they don't, I would be willing to bet that it will bite them in the ass soon. While I don't know if I would call it extortion like the AC a few posts up, it is pretty close to it.
I'm not the one who pointed it out, but I guess the "expression" should be "hear, hear". "Here, here" is however, as you point out quite indicative; Only usually what it indicates is that someone got it wrong.
No, this is simply about oracle charging an AMC because the customer did the equivalent of losing the installation CDs
Well yes, the point is that Oracle is charging an AMC for the equivalent of the customer losing their install CDs. Nothing illegal, but stuff to be aware of.
Also nothing like the iOS comparison you made
Now, their absolutely worthless technical support combined with their arrogance - these are likely to kill Solaris and SPARC.
As a long time Sparc/SunOS/Solaris fan, it pains me to say this, but I think that Solaris and Sparc are what is going to kill Solaris and Sparc.
In every case where we have migrated from mega-buck, dedicated Solaris on Sparc servers to Linux VMs on still high-end but not quite as many mega-bucks x86 hardware we have seen drastically increased performance, greatly simplified administration, and big reductions in call volume for the help desk folks.
Unless you have a need for one of the niche areas where Solaris still provides solid advantages (and those are becoming fewer and fewer), it's time to move on.
I'm not the one who pointed it out, but I guess the "expression" should be "hear, hear". "Here, here" is however, as you point out quite indicative; Only usually what it indicates is that someone got it wrong.
There, there.
No, "here" is a misuse of a homonym. Who cares where you are? The correct expression is "Hear", as in "Hear this!". Then again, you also "gin up", not "jin up". I don't know the origin of that one, but considering the topic, I'd definitely add more liquor.
Wherever you work and are fed up of Oracle , just drop the shit.There are alternatives to their crap.Enough is enough. .. i mean that in itself is totally unacceptable.
Imagine if Microsoft was to do the same and charge for updates
Vulnerabilities are defects in the product. They have to be fixed for free. If there's a car with a brake problem on the market the manufacturer has to fix their shit for free to the customer. Same for software . If a vuln can jeapardise millions of accounts and potentially cost hundreds of millions to banks or credit card companies , beleive me there will be some finger pointing. Oracle is simply milking the users for every penny providing with flawed software and then charging for the priviledge of " having your brakes fixed. Totally Oracle ( ridiculous )
Toss their garbage in the bin and get on the alternatives.
Because we sure as hell pay a lot of money to Oracle, but don't have very much to show for it.
But that is not the issue here. The issue mentioned a few comments up is that someone cannot even get an 8 year old driver for his 8 year old hardware.
He is not so much worried about the bleeding edge, he just wants his hardware to run.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
the areas where Oracle is ahead in 2013 are areas that 98% of the databases don't need and thus many companies should explore moving down market.
Except down-market is Oracle too. Oracle owns MySQL and Berkeley DB.
"Here, here." Is valid.
True.
It is indicative of agreement.
False. You are thinking of "Hear, hear".
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Oracle employee here. As usual, "I work for Oracle, but I do not speak for Oracle" etc. etc.
Let me explain a few things to you folks. Oracle are not especially good. Nor are they especially evil.
Oracle exist for one reason, and reason only--to make money. For Oracle, nothing else matters.
The most important folks at Oracle are the MBAs and the lawyers. They basically run the company.
They can and will explore and take advantage of any and every legal avenue for generating revenue that they can come up with.
People taking stuff for free that legally they should be paying for does not generate revenue. Therefore, it is not tolerated.
Period. End of story.
An "egg corn" it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Ignorant it is.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I especially love it when sales people try to sell you a $50,000 solution for a small business and claim that TCO is always lower. It seems, the higher the up-front cost, the lower the TCO is!
Sounds a lot like the Indian call centre employees calling on behalf of telcos.
"Sir I just want to save you money on your phone bill."
"But you're trying to sign me up for a more expensive plan."
"Yes but you get a new phone with more included value."
3rd party companies providing support for a vendor's hardware/software is incredibly common in this industry. I work for a very large enterprise storage company, and a good chunk of the customers for our training classes are from these professional support companies. Customer or reseller buys our storage, they either buy a support contract from us or someone else.
God, I have never liked Larry Ellison!
I worked at Sun from 1997 to 2004. and interviewed at Oracle at Redwood Shores in 1993, and I describe my experience as "leaving a bad taste in my mouth", feeling that the work environment was chintzy. Events subsequent have confirmed my feelings that Ellison and Oracle, were bad people to work for.
As for Solaris, its niche is big servers, serving Big Data, and if you are a big business, a big financial institution, you will shut up and pay whatever Ellison extorts from you. These guys were Sun's customers and they were largely responsible for mismanagement of markets and the meltdown of 2008 and the problems they created have not been fixed; the Congress has evaded its duty to repair this broken system, driven by bogus mathematics. Screw them all!
As for the rest of us with more usual requirements, there is not need for Solaris as opposed to Linux, and that became obvious to Sun in about 2003. By then Intel servers were powerful enough to meet mid-sized needs with Linux, no need for Solaris. Since Sun short changed X86 Solaris, even not supporting it for a time, they lost any chance of getting a piece of the consumer market that Steve Jobs was able to exploit. That left Sun dependent on the Big Data, Big Iron people who had to cut their expenditures during the Great Recession, which they helped cause. At the same time Sun put more resources into Java, trying to play catch-up with in the IDE market. Sun lost on both fronts and was bought by Ellison.
Java is legacy, and now there are much better OO alternatives because of the JIT processing and the weaker enforcement of type, but also because Sun did not do a good job designing the class libraries. It has gone the way of PL/1 and now languages like python are much better OO implementations, and Javascript has become a much better client language in the browser, largely because of the frameworks models that rely on lambda functions. Even if the ACM front end for Java had been the standard instead of the Sun Class Libraries, Java would have been a much better language. I think that because of the corporate appeal that Sun wrote the libraries with lots of dross, security via obfescation.
My last experience at Sun was telling. I knew system administration and legacy compilers. I was the mid-teir support for the Fortran Compiler and did other support for gcc. I was asked to change my focus to java and to provide support for Netbeans then under development. I found this to be very challenging for me because of my vision disability. The camel text and the poor formatting of the debugging stream made it very hard for me to do my job, and even though Sun paid some lip service to assessability it was not adequate and finally a lippy manager caused me to leave. Later a visually impaired system admin I met flat out said that Java was not accessable. My subsequent experience was that by the time they were stable products eclipse and netbeans had improved font size and debugging info. I seems that for Java, Eclipse has become more widely used and I wonder if Netbeans is even still around. Maybe Ellison's greed has forced people to use Eclipse instead of Netbeans. It seems like the same is the case for Solaris.
...I'm done. It's a pity, really; for all their misteps, Sun did some interesting, useful, innovative things. And during those parts of my career when I was working in education, they were generous with hardware, software, and time -- even when it wasn't clear that it would have a short-term benefit for Sun. They knew that down the road, we'd remember, and we'd spec their gear in proposals -- and we did.
But now? I've spent the last year excising Oracle products. I've decomissioned and sold off hardware, I've deinstalled software, I've cancelled support contract after support contract, I've done everything possible to remove all traces of Oracle from the operation. One might think that Oracle would care that a 30-year customer is leaving...but they don't. One might think Oracle would care that a multi-million dollar account is leaving...but they don't. One might think Oracle would care that they are poisoning the well (since I'm teaching everyone who works for me to avoid them, and why)...but they don't.
Oracle is well on its way to destroying, in a few short years, the work of decades.
They don't care.
1) Oracle OWNS Solaris and the SPARC architecture - they were never free to begin with, they have always been owned,
Um, actually no they don't. I used to work in the offices of the non-profit that owns to the rights to SPARC hardware. It's an organization called SPARC International, Inc. and they make money off of licensing the trademark. If you pay up enough, your company can have a seat on the executive board of the organization, along with Oracle, Fujitsu amongst several others.
I'm honest enough to admit I lie to myself.
New support agreements for low-end Cisco gear are fairly cheap. I'd say $300-$500 is what you should budget.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.