[aklug] Re: Oracle & Sun

I do not think Larry Ellison is a bad guy. He is a business man. Sure he was
more humble and even Microsoft and Apple struggled as they had to prove
themselves before they could get more shareholder and VC money to grow to
where they are today.
Oracle is just figuring out which products are the most profitable and how
to squeeze the maximum profitability for each product. Unfortunately, giving
away free software does not fit this model. We are customers to Oracle and
not technological enthusiasts. The Java lawsuit does bother me and I do not
like the fact that an OS is tied to Oracle products. The whole idea to buy
an Oracle workstation with solaris to run PostgreSQL seems strange now and I
wonder if future licensing would make this impossible. It sucks for the
users.

Sun wanted to do more things but it seems Oracle loves its niche as a
business player and is using Sun's assets to boast these offerings.

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 9:27 PM, Jim <jwadell@gci.net> wrote:

> 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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> >
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Received on Thu Sep 30 08:15:55 2010