[aklug] Re: Oracle & Sun

I GUESS there is some advantage to being an old guy. In the 1980's we
kept Oracle alive. Larry pleaded with us to buy Oracle licenses at
$10,000 a pop, because he could not make the payroll. The office was on
Sandhill road in Palo Alto, and the default password was sandhill. Larry
had a big Mercedes, and he would take us to a nice Chinese resteant down
in PA. He loved the whole fish, fried upright and surrounded by sauce.
Jim (now James) worked for the same company I did. He was a more than
brilliant programmer, and we all thought it was cool when he got a job
with Sun.

When Larry got involved with a lady of Japanese decent (My wife was
also, and was sympathetic, which caused a rift), I supported him.

I guess I am a poor judge of character, he make a bunch more ca-ching
than I did. However, I sleep at night.

Royce Williams wrote:
> Thomas Martin said, on 09/28/2010 02:43 PM:
>
>> Perhaps it's because I'm a relative youngling when compared to the computer
>> industry, but what are the implications of Oracle owning Sun? I've heard a
>> lot of talk about it and have done some research, but I'm still in murky
>> water regarding the topic.
>>
>
> From what I've heard, Oracle is a lot more "my way or the highway", and a lot less F/OSS-friendly.
>
> Oracle ended OpenSolaris and refused to even communication with the OpenOffice.org board.
>
> Some prominent leavers:
>
> * The head ZFS guy (Bonwick) just announced that he's leaving:
> http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/and_now_page_2
>
> * One of the main DTrace guys (Cantrill) is leaving:
> http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/07/25/good-bye-sun/
>
> * Most telling is this interview with James Gosling, father of Java, about why he left.
> http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Java-Creator-James-Gosling-Why-I-Quit-Oracle-813517/
>
>
> Sun's position was that employee blog posts were the property of the employee. Oracle evan rescinded that. That should tell you something. They are a lot more "corporate" in the sense of "conscienceless machine that eats people and excretes profit" than Sun ever was.
>
> I am glad that many of the above, and MySQL, are all open source and therefore still free/libre. Java itself is still a little up in the air, maybe.
>
> Royce
>
>
>
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Received on Wed Sep 29 21:28:11 2010