Yep, there was definitely a jump in postgresql around that time too, but the slope for MySQL appears to have gone up. There wasn't any sort of mass exodus from MySQL to PostgreSQL.
What I think OpenOffice.org really needs is an integration with something like Google Docs but open so others can implement it.
Basically, Google Docs serves as a content revision system and OpenOffice.org is the fat client to it, but you can also connect and edit in Google Docs as well.
When Sun was buying MySQL, there was a lot of FUD how it was going to ruin it, but looking at MySQL job trends it seems as if MySQL adoption has increased.
Even after the acquisition, people try to paint Sun in a bad light over what's been going on with MySQL. For example, when it was announced that MySQL was going to come out with some features that would only be available in the closed source, enterprise version, the decision was attributed to Sun, when it seemed like it was really Mickos' decision. He was the former CEO of MySQL AB.
When Sun reversed the decision, the news was the MySQL made the change.
Even recently, what's been going on with Monty Widenus leaving Sun has been used to make Sun sound like it was hurting MySQL, but if you read Monty's blog about why he left Sun, it sounds more like he was unhappy with MySQL management, and not Sun.
I get the impression that Monty wasn't all that happy with MySQL AB even before they were bought by Sun. When Sun bought them, he was hoping for things to improve but that never happened.
Unfortunately, even a company like Sun is not the same as a startup before VC money and board members come in. It seems it's not as stifling as other companies though, but not what Monty was expecting.
People like Monty probably aren't meant for that type of atmosphere. Probably why people like Andy Bechtolstein come and go frequently.
Are you sure? I thought it was StarOffice that was protected, but Sun was indemnifying Open Office users as well?
In any case, the agreement was back in 2004 and nothing has happened since then.
I had a thought in the past about house Sun could improve their OpenOffice development to include more outside contributors. It would be true for any of their open source projects.
One of the big issues with big companies dealing with open source projects is that they aren't required to use the public colaboration tools. In fact it's harder for them to do so.
Instead of Sally asking a question or presenting an idea to Joe on the mailing list, where everyone can see it, Sally might run into Joe in the hallway or walk up to his desk. So all these ideas that Sally and Joe are exchanging are "closed".
It may be ore productive, but it doesn't include the community.
It might be better for the community if employees working on open source projects mostly worked from home to encourage them to use the community collaboration tools.
I think Sun might understand this. The disadvantage of meeting someone in the hallway is something I heard in a presentation from a Sun employee. That might be why they have been working on the Wonderland project.
With Wonderland, you can get all the developers in one virtual conference room without having to really see or smell them which can be a very good thing. I've had my share of marathon coding sessions.
sparc servers as a not growing market, huh? You, Sir, seriously need to have a look at the T2+ and the Sparc64 based servers.
In sun's quarterly report they said that the SPARC enterprise line of server revenues were declining while SPARC CMT line and x86 server revenues were both growing but not enough to make up for the declines in SPARC Enterprise.
So if you take x86 out of the picture, the gains in SPARC CMT covers the los of revenues in non CMT SPARC servers even less.
I think that you are a lot closer now than you were the other day. Back then you were indicating that Oracle would drop Linux
I never said that what I said was "They will support Linux but will likely push Solaris". Being their second most popular OS, it wouldn't make sense to drop Linux
I think they might decide to switch their development platform back to Solaris though.
Right now for Oracle, it seems to be Solaris/SPARC and Linux/X86 but I think it makes more sense now to support Solaris/x86 more than they have in the past as a platform for Oracle and I hope they keep Solaris/x86 releases of Oracle up to date.
In the last thread, you said the Sun reps gave you a hard time about deploying Linux on Sun hardware. Were you going to do it on SPARC or on their x86 servers? If it was the SPARC kit, I can understand their reluctance, while Linux on SPARC is possible, it's not as well supported and there doesn't seem to be much ISV support. If it was on x86 hardware, I can see them wanting to push their own OS.
If you go to HP or IBM and want to get their Unix hardware, they're going to push HPUX or AIX respectively, I don't see that as any different.
That's just some exadata storage servers thrown in a rack with some DL360s.
When Oracle owns Sun, they will own all the hardware necessary to replicate that in house. Which would bring down consumer costs and increase profits for Oracle.
I'm genuinely curious why you would think that. Oracle is a software company. I suspect that Sun's hardware business will be the first thing Oracle jettisons.
Oracle is mostly deployed on Solaris/SPARC with Linux coming in second, despite Oracle's Linux push.
The cost of Sun Hardware is a drop in the bucket compared to Oracle licensing costs and if people are willing to pay that much they want a solution that will give them peace of mind on mission critical systems. Solaris/SPARC still has some benefits over Linux/x86.
Oracle has a high-end database machine which is made by HP
HP and Oracle came out with the Exadata storage server. That's not a "high-end database machine". Oracle seems particularly interested in Sun's Open Storage systems. Their other storage solutions, should also be of interest and you have to wonder what will come of Exadata now that Oracle will be able to manufacture their own with ZFS.
I really don't see what owning SPARC servers (not a growing market), x86 servers (high effort, low return), or tape systems (StorageTek) gives them.
While UltraSPARC servers have been declining, the CoolThreads servers have been growing. In a previous story, someone commented on getting an Oracle branded server and the core counts made it sound like it was a rebranded Sun CoolThreads server.
If you don't see what owning the most popular platform used to deploy their software, x64 servers for edge servers and smaller deployments and storage and backup solutions might mean to Oracle, don't know what I can tell you.
Sun's desktop strategy has moved from creating a desktop OS, to creating an OS that developers would prefer and their thin client and application delivery system.
SunStudio and DTrace for developers and Sun Ray for other people's desktops. In addition to remote desktops to thin clients they have technology that allows you to run linux and windows applications servered remotely within you Solaris session.
Desktops in the corporate world are more than just the physical machines and OS's these days. Sun's Identity Management software is very good too. Oracle has done a bit in this area and combining the work of both companies could really help out.
They day they announced the merger, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said that Solaris/SPARC was still the biggest place where Oracle was being deployed.
With all the pushing that Oracle has been doing towards Linux, their customers don't seem to be following. The question must have been raised whether Oracle should be leading their customers in OS choice, or following.
Oracle won't drop Linux, but they'll probably do more what IBM does. They'd rather sell you on AIX but if you want Linux you can have it.
8. Solaris - I see all of the cool features of Solaris (dtrace) moved over to Oracles Linux (if possible). That Linux version will run on "standard" X86 hardware or for "full support" it will run on the Oracle hardware (Sparc). This process will probably take 5 or more years.
That contradicts your initial premise and sounds more like wishful thinking.
All the cool stuff in Solaris is already in Solaris and making money. Yes people still use Solaris on new machines. Last quarter Sun sold almost $1 billion worth of SPARC based servers.
Since Solaris/SPARC is the leading platform for Oracle deployments, it makes more financial sense for Oracle to keep Solaris competitive against Linux in addition to it being cheaper than trying to integrate things into Linux.
Now that Oracle will have ZFS, I would wonder what might happen to Btrfs, which is an Oracle project.
Dude! I hope you didn't reply to that message and give any personal information. It's clearly a phishing attempt, and a poor one at that!
First, the Sun/Oracle deal hasn't been finalized. Second, you can see their form message software screwed up and didn't replace the variables X, Y and Z with real products. I see that happening a lot in spam lately. Third, they didn't sign it with a full name, title, and contact information.
According to this blog post, Oracle is the biggest user of applets in their Oracle Forms. The author thinks that moving oracle forms to javafx could be a big plus for Oracle and I think there are merits to what he says.
The popular alternative is Adobe Flash. It's been a while since I tried programming in actionscript but last time I did, I had lots of bumps and bruises from knocking my head against the wall.
The last release of Project Looking Glass was in January of 2007. I don't think there's been much going on with that. Since then, I think Sun has been contributing more to Compiz to get it working with Soliars.
I don't know if Orion was ever "the BEST" J2EE server, but it claims to have been the first fully J2EE compliant one.
Oracle didn't buy Orion, they licensed it and used it as the base of their Oracle Application Server. Don't know how that screwed it up since Orion still exists on it's own and isn't owned by Oracle.
Glassfish is the J2EE server reference implementation. It's important to keep it as a reference implementation and is becoming very popular.
I remember before Tomcat became the reference implementation for the Servlet spec, it was popular to use but hard to find hosting for. After it became the reference implementation (and performance improved) more hosts started offering it instead of (or in addition to) resin.
In the opensource J2EE server space, Glassfish is well behind JBoss, but more popular than Apache Geronimo and it is gaining. If they need to keep a reference implentation for the J2EE spec, it would likely be an open source project. JBoss I think is out because they can't get enough control of it, Geronimo is heavily backed by IBM, (who Oracle is competing with on the DB and middleware front) so that only leaves Glassfish.
I think there's good reason to keep Netbeans around for Oracle.
It looks like Oracle gave up on JDeveloper as a general purpose IDE and it's more geared towards Oracle developers. I understand that Oracle has done quite a bit to clean up JBuilder and that it can also be used as a RCP like Eclipse and NetBeans, just that Oracle hasn't opened the API (or the source code).
There are many ways that NetBeans is better than JDeveloper though, not just in terms of features, but also in performance. Oracle was able to come up with plugins for Eclipse but not Netbeans.
While Eclipse has the lead, NetBeans has been doing better and it provides a much better out of the box experience than Eclipse. If you want to start J2EE development, it's much easier to get started with NetBeans than Eclipse.
Creating a set of plugins to make a JDeveloper based on NetBeans is not trivial but I believe a worthwhile endeavor. JDeveloper and NetBeans are both behind Eclipse but combining efforts would make both more relevant. Oracle has a lot of people that made JDeveloper great, and Sun has a strong group that made NetBeans great. The combination could help skyrocket marketshare. Personally, I don't know how anyone could use Eclipse these days, especially in a corporate development setting.
Netbeans is also the basis of a lot of Sun's infrastructure products. These will be important to Oracle. While Oracle claims they are not interested in cloud computing, the technology used for Sun's Cloud is the same used for it's virtualization and provisioning systems, which Oracle is interested in. Basically a private cloud. It's also the basis of some of the developer tools such as Sun Studio.
Oracle is larger, but I don't know about "much larger".
Employees: Sun: ~42,200 Oracle: ~72,000
The Sun number is more recent. The Oracle number is older and they've had a lot of layoffs.
Revenue: Sun: close to $14 billion annually Oracle: ~$22 billion in 08, but that was a big jump from $18billion in 07, $14billion in 06.
Property, Plant and Equipment: Both are about the same at around $1.6 billion.
Oracle and Sun both put a lot into R&D but Oracle has been growing R&D while Sun has been forced to scale back because they haven't been making as much profit, and recently losing money.
Oracle's market cap dwarfs Suns.
I think you're both right though.
Oracle is a bigger company, but Sun has a wider range of products/projects than Oracle (I know it's more than just a db company now).
There is value to Sun's brands and it might be more recognizable than Oracle in some cases, but I don't see Ellison giving up Oracle.
Any idea on what the underlying hardware and OS is?
Based on the core counts, it sounds like T2 processors. The largest Opteron server I've heard of only has 32 cores and the Nehalem processors are too new and I haven't seen anything greater than 2 socket motherboards yet.
I wouldn't be surprised if it were the CoolThreads servers since Oracle seems to perform very well on them and SPARC is a popular choice for Oracle deployments.
Slashdot Mirror
With Btrfs still being unstable and slow, what is going to happen to it once Oracle completes it's purchase of Sun and gets ZFS and Solaris?
Lessig is probably the most knowledgeable person on the planet when it comes to US law on fair use.
But apparently not good at communication?
and has asked someone to send Warner Music a copy of US copyright law that deals with 'fair use.'
Did they take down his email, fax line and ban him from the post office too?
If we really make a push to convert all cars to being electric, that's a ton of lithium required
And it is estimated that there are 5.4 million tons, so by your estimates, we could convert all the cars 5.4 million times over.
But maybe you're estimate is a bit off :)
Yep, there was definitely a jump in postgresql around that time too, but the slope for MySQL appears to have gone up. There wasn't any sort of mass exodus from MySQL to PostgreSQL.
Maybe some of that was people afraid of what would happen to MySQL as a result of Sun's acquisition but it could also be a result of Sun providing support for PostgreSQL and including it in Solaris 10. Around June 2007 there was a big spike and that was when Sun came out with the first industry standard benchmark Sun put out with PostgreSQL, Sun Java App Server on a T2000 UltraSPARC T1 server.
I could really care less what happens to MySQL, I'm more concerned what happens with Sun's future contributions to PostgreSQL.
Sorry, I don't see the difference.
I accept your apology.
What I think OpenOffice.org really needs is an integration with something like Google Docs but open so others can implement it.
Basically, Google Docs serves as a content revision system and OpenOffice.org is the fat client to it, but you can also connect and edit in Google Docs as well.
That's a very good point.
When Sun was buying MySQL, there was a lot of FUD how it was going to ruin it, but looking at MySQL job trends it seems as if MySQL adoption has increased.
Even after the acquisition, people try to paint Sun in a bad light over what's been going on with MySQL. For example, when it was announced that MySQL was going to come out with some features that would only be available in the closed source, enterprise version, the decision was attributed to Sun, when it seemed like it was really Mickos' decision. He was the former CEO of MySQL AB.
When Sun reversed the decision, the news was the MySQL made the change.
Even recently, what's been going on with Monty Widenus leaving Sun has been used to make Sun sound like it was hurting MySQL, but if you read Monty's blog about why he left Sun, it sounds more like he was unhappy with MySQL management, and not Sun.
I get the impression that Monty wasn't all that happy with MySQL AB even before they were bought by Sun. When Sun bought them, he was hoping for things to improve but that never happened.
Unfortunately, even a company like Sun is not the same as a startup before VC money and board members come in. It seems it's not as stifling as other companies though, but not what Monty was expecting.
People like Monty probably aren't meant for that type of atmosphere. Probably why people like Andy Bechtolstein come and go frequently.
Ooops... Forgot the link to a story about the deal as it relates to OO.o
Are you sure? I thought it was StarOffice that was protected, but Sun was indemnifying Open Office users as well?
In any case, the agreement was back in 2004 and nothing has happened since then.
I had a thought in the past about house Sun could improve their OpenOffice development to include more outside contributors. It would be true for any of their open source projects.
One of the big issues with big companies dealing with open source projects is that they aren't required to use the public colaboration tools. In fact it's harder for them to do so.
Instead of Sally asking a question or presenting an idea to Joe on the mailing list, where everyone can see it, Sally might run into Joe in the hallway or walk up to his desk. So all these ideas that Sally and Joe are exchanging are "closed".
It may be ore productive, but it doesn't include the community.
It might be better for the community if employees working on open source projects mostly worked from home to encourage them to use the community collaboration tools.
I think Sun might understand this. The disadvantage of meeting someone in the hallway is something I heard in a presentation from a Sun employee. That might be why they have been working on the Wonderland project.
With Wonderland, you can get all the developers in one virtual conference room without having to really see or smell them which can be a very good thing. I've had my share of marathon coding sessions.
sparc servers as a not growing market, huh? You, Sir, seriously need to have a look at the T2+ and the Sparc64 based servers.
In sun's quarterly report they said that the SPARC enterprise line of server revenues were declining while SPARC CMT line and x86 server revenues were both growing but not enough to make up for the declines in SPARC Enterprise.
So if you take x86 out of the picture, the gains in SPARC CMT covers the los of revenues in non CMT SPARC servers even less.
I think that you are a lot closer now than you were the other day. Back then you were indicating that Oracle would drop Linux
I never said that what I said was "They will support Linux but will likely push Solaris". Being their second most popular OS, it wouldn't make sense to drop Linux
I think they might decide to switch their development platform back to Solaris though.
Right now for Oracle, it seems to be Solaris/SPARC and Linux/X86 but I think it makes more sense now to support Solaris/x86 more than they have in the past as a platform for Oracle and I hope they keep Solaris/x86 releases of Oracle up to date.
In the last thread, you said the Sun reps gave you a hard time about deploying Linux on Sun hardware. Were you going to do it on SPARC or on their x86 servers? If it was the SPARC kit, I can understand their reluctance, while Linux on SPARC is possible, it's not as well supported and there doesn't seem to be much ISV support. If it was on x86 hardware, I can see them wanting to push their own OS.
If you go to HP or IBM and want to get their Unix hardware, they're going to push HPUX or AIX respectively, I don't see that as any different.
That's just some exadata storage servers thrown in a rack with some DL360s.
When Oracle owns Sun, they will own all the hardware necessary to replicate that in house. Which would bring down consumer costs and increase profits for Oracle.
Glassfish isn't so bad compared to other app servers and the integration between NetBeans and Glassfish has really helped a lot.
Tomcat is a lot easier but it's not a full J2EE app server, it's only the servlet container.
A lot of the times you don't need the full J2EE stack. Tomcat is sufficient.
I'm genuinely curious why you would think that. Oracle is a software company. I suspect that Sun's hardware business will be the first thing Oracle jettisons.
Oracle is mostly deployed on Solaris/SPARC with Linux coming in second, despite Oracle's Linux push.
The cost of Sun Hardware is a drop in the bucket compared to Oracle licensing costs and if people are willing to pay that much they want a solution that will give them peace of mind on mission critical systems. Solaris/SPARC still has some benefits over Linux/x86.
Oracle has a high-end database machine which is made by HP
HP and Oracle came out with the Exadata storage server. That's not a "high-end database machine". Oracle seems particularly interested in Sun's Open Storage systems. Their other storage solutions, should also be of interest and you have to wonder what will come of Exadata now that Oracle will be able to manufacture their own with ZFS.
I really don't see what owning SPARC servers (not a growing market), x86 servers (high effort, low return), or tape systems (StorageTek) gives them.
While UltraSPARC servers have been declining, the CoolThreads servers have been growing. In a previous story, someone commented on getting an Oracle branded server and the core counts made it sound like it was a rebranded Sun CoolThreads server.
If you don't see what owning the most popular platform used to deploy their software, x64 servers for edge servers and smaller deployments and storage and backup solutions might mean to Oracle, don't know what I can tell you.
You had so many things wrong in just your first paragraph, I couldn't read the rest.
Sun's desktop strategy has moved from creating a desktop OS, to creating an OS that developers would prefer and their thin client and application delivery system.
SunStudio and DTrace for developers and Sun Ray for other people's desktops. In addition to remote desktops to thin clients they have technology that allows you to run linux and windows applications servered remotely within you Solaris session.
Desktops in the corporate world are more than just the physical machines and OS's these days. Sun's Identity Management software is very good too. Oracle has done a bit in this area and combining the work of both companies could really help out.
They day they announced the merger, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said that Solaris/SPARC was still the biggest place where Oracle was being deployed.
With all the pushing that Oracle has been doing towards Linux, their customers don't seem to be following. The question must have been raised whether Oracle should be leading their customers in OS choice, or following.
Oracle won't drop Linux, but they'll probably do more what IBM does. They'd rather sell you on AIX but if you want Linux you can have it.
8. Solaris - I see all of the cool features of Solaris (dtrace) moved over to Oracles Linux (if possible). That Linux version will run on "standard" X86 hardware or for "full support" it will run on the Oracle hardware (Sparc). This process will probably take 5 or more years.
That contradicts your initial premise and sounds more like wishful thinking.
All the cool stuff in Solaris is already in Solaris and making money. Yes people still use Solaris on new machines. Last quarter Sun sold almost $1 billion worth of SPARC based servers.
Since Solaris/SPARC is the leading platform for Oracle deployments, it makes more financial sense for Oracle to keep Solaris competitive against Linux in addition to it being cheaper than trying to integrate things into Linux.
Now that Oracle will have ZFS, I would wonder what might happen to Btrfs, which is an Oracle project.
Dude! I hope you didn't reply to that message and give any personal information. It's clearly a phishing attempt, and a poor one at that!
First, the Sun/Oracle deal hasn't been finalized.
Second, you can see their form message software screwed up and didn't replace the variables X, Y and Z with real products. I see that happening a lot in spam lately.
Third, they didn't sign it with a full name, title, and contact information.
According to this blog post, Oracle is the biggest user of applets in their Oracle Forms. The author thinks that moving oracle forms to javafx could be a big plus for Oracle and I think there are merits to what he says.
The popular alternative is Adobe Flash. It's been a while since I tried programming in actionscript but last time I did, I had lots of bumps and bruises from knocking my head against the wall.
The last release of Project Looking Glass was in January of 2007. I don't think there's been much going on with that. Since then, I think Sun has been contributing more to Compiz to get it working with Soliars.
I don't know if Orion was ever "the BEST" J2EE server, but it claims to have been the first fully J2EE compliant one.
Oracle didn't buy Orion, they licensed it and used it as the base of their Oracle Application Server. Don't know how that screwed it up since Orion still exists on it's own and isn't owned by Oracle.
Glassfish is the J2EE server reference implementation. It's important to keep it as a reference implementation and is becoming very popular.
I remember before Tomcat became the reference implementation for the Servlet spec, it was popular to use but hard to find hosting for. After it became the reference implementation (and performance improved) more hosts started offering it instead of (or in addition to) resin.
In the opensource J2EE server space, Glassfish is well behind JBoss, but more popular than Apache Geronimo and it is gaining. If they need to keep a reference implentation for the J2EE spec, it would likely be an open source project. JBoss I think is out because they can't get enough control of it, Geronimo is heavily backed by IBM, (who Oracle is competing with on the DB and middleware front) so that only leaves Glassfish.
In other news, I saw this on digg a couple days ago. Grats to slashdot on shamelessly reposting digg content.
Digg doesn't create content.
I always found it troubling that one of the computational algorithms they relied on was also the name of where James Bond liked to gamble.
Please tell them not to kill NetBeans :(
I think there's good reason to keep Netbeans around for Oracle.
It looks like Oracle gave up on JDeveloper as a general purpose IDE and it's more geared towards Oracle developers. I understand that Oracle has done quite a bit to clean up JBuilder and that it can also be used as a RCP like Eclipse and NetBeans, just that Oracle hasn't opened the API (or the source code).
There are many ways that NetBeans is better than JDeveloper though, not just in terms of features, but also in performance. Oracle was able to come up with plugins for Eclipse but not Netbeans.
While Eclipse has the lead, NetBeans has been doing better and it provides a much better out of the box experience than Eclipse. If you want to start J2EE development, it's much easier to get started with NetBeans than Eclipse.
Creating a set of plugins to make a JDeveloper based on NetBeans is not trivial but I believe a worthwhile endeavor. JDeveloper and NetBeans are both behind Eclipse but combining efforts would make both more relevant. Oracle has a lot of people that made JDeveloper great, and Sun has a strong group that made NetBeans great. The combination could help skyrocket marketshare. Personally, I don't know how anyone could use Eclipse these days, especially in a corporate development setting.
Netbeans is also the basis of a lot of Sun's infrastructure products. These will be important to Oracle. While Oracle claims they are not interested in cloud computing, the technology used for Sun's Cloud is the same used for it's virtualization and provisioning systems, which Oracle is interested in. Basically a private cloud. It's also the basis of some of the developer tools such as Sun Studio.
Oracle is larger, but I don't know about "much larger".
Employees:
Sun: ~42,200
Oracle: ~72,000
The Sun number is more recent. The Oracle number is older and they've had a lot of layoffs.
Revenue:
Sun: close to $14 billion annually
Oracle: ~$22 billion in 08, but that was a big jump from $18billion in 07, $14billion in 06.
Property, Plant and Equipment:
Both are about the same at around $1.6 billion.
Oracle and Sun both put a lot into R&D but Oracle has been growing R&D while Sun has been forced to scale back because they haven't been making as much profit, and recently losing money.
Oracle's market cap dwarfs Suns.
I think you're both right though.
Oracle is a bigger company, but Sun has a wider range of products/projects than Oracle (I know it's more than just a db company now).
There is value to Sun's brands and it might be more recognizable than Oracle in some cases, but I don't see Ellison giving up Oracle.
Any idea on what the underlying hardware and OS is?
Based on the core counts, it sounds like T2 processors. The largest Opteron server I've heard of only has 32 cores and the Nehalem processors are too new and I haven't seen anything greater than 2 socket motherboards yet.
I wouldn't be surprised if it were the CoolThreads servers since Oracle seems to perform very well on them and SPARC is a popular choice for Oracle deployments.