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Other thoughts on OracleOther thoughts on OraclePosted Aug 17, 2010 18:28 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)In reply to: Other thoughts on Oracle by rahvin Parent article: A very grumpy editor's thoughts on Oracle
I thought Oracle was pretty clear that they bought Sun for Java.
But I didn't say patent trolling was the reason Oracle bought Sun. I said that could be the long-term value of the purchase.
And I certainly don't see how Android is "essentially a closed platform". It's closed to the extent that it needs to be in order for it to be acceptable to the carriers, but is much more open than the iPhone or any other widespread (at least in the US) smartphone OS. They keep some apps and drivers to themselves, and they aren't incredibly accepting of outside contributions, but the code is out there for people to modify and add to.
I doubt that Oracle cares whether the FOSS community abandons Java, since the FOSS community (unlike the enterprise world) never really embraced Java very much. Google itself is pretty tied to Java though.
If Google were to migrate Android to anything else, I'd bet that it would be either Javascript or Python, in that order. But I don't expect it to come to that.
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Other thoughts on Oracle Posted Aug 17, 2010 20:36 UTC (Tue) by jonabbey (subscriber, #2736) [Link]
"I doubt that Oracle cares whether the FOSS community abandons Java, since the FOSS community (unlike the enterprise world) never really embraced Java very much. Google itself is pretty tied to Java though."
Eh? You mean aside from most Apache Foundation projects (Abdera, ActiveMQ, Ant, Archiva, and Avro, just to list the ones that start with 'A'), JBoss, JRuby, Jython, Clojure, SWT, Eclipse, Spring, Scala, iText, ANTLR, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.?
Other thoughts on Oracle Posted Aug 18, 2010 2:10 UTC (Wed) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link]
How many of those are installed on an average Linux box? Approximately none of them - no disrespect intended.
Other thoughts on Oracle Posted Aug 18, 2010 4:27 UTC (Wed) by jonabbey (subscriber, #2736) [Link]
That would depend on what you think the average Linux box is doing. If you think the average Linux box is acting as a desktop system, perhaps not.
Other thoughts on Oracle Posted Aug 18, 2010 10:07 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] I think the mode for Linux boxes is "embedded/device"; probably the median as well. The mean probably can't be usefully defined in this context.
Other thoughts on Oracle Posted Aug 18, 2010 6:23 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
It is not dangerous at at all for Oracle to anger the Apache community. One of its fundamental values is that business is a necessary evil, and we need to be nice with it (hence the permissiveness of Apache license: it does not require that stuff is kept open source, it hopes businesses will be so nice as to contribute to the open source version and not fork it in closed products).
SUN has been at odds with Apache for years (over Harmony and the TCK, over the dumping of Tomcat as reference J2EE implementation for Glassfish, etc) and apart from some sabre rattling from the Apache foundation every once in a while what did it ever cost them?
What *is* dangerous is to anger the copyleft crowd, because it does not care about corporations liking it or not, stuff which is copyleft must stay copyleft there are no choices in the matter.
Other thoughts on Oracle Posted Aug 17, 2010 22:45 UTC (Tue) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]
I may not have kept up on the news very well, but I do remember very well a news article after the acquisition was approved stating that the primary asset at Sun they wanted was Sparc so they could compete more effectively against IBM's full stack of software and hardware. Oracle's missing piece in enterprise sales was the ability to offer an integrated software and hardware stack. With Sun they not only gain Sparc and a Linux supported architecture, but they also gain Solaris which is competitive with AIX as a proprietary OS. It was stated in the article that they pursued the acquisition because IBM was able to steal some high profile enterprise clients from them using the fully integrated software and hardware offerings.
Could you point me to this statement that they went for Sun because of Java? As I stated I was always under the impression that Java and Mysql were just small bits compared to the hardware assets in the desire for the acquisition.
Other thoughts on Oracle Posted Aug 18, 2010 19:09 UTC (Wed) by davecb (subscriber, #1574) [Link] There was widespread speculation that Oracle was buying Sun for Java, IMHO primarily from people who don't have more than 4 CPUs in anything they use. --dave (I only own < 4 socket systems, but use 32 to 64-socket systems in my work as a capacity planner) c-b
Other thoughts on Oracle Posted Aug 27, 2010 23:22 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] I may not have kept up on the news very well, but I do remember very well a news article after the acquisition was approved stating that the primary asset at Sun they wanted was Sparc so they could compete more effectively against IBM's full stack of software and hardware. I don't doubt that Oracle wouldn't mind as tall a stack as they can deliver, but how desirable Sun's hardware was in such a stack for the likes of Oracle to actually pay for and own is open to question. Certainly, various reports in places like The Register claimed that no-one wanted to buy the hardware divisions of Sun in an acquisition, that Oracle already had a partnership with HP, and that Fujitsu was tipped to pick up the remainder of Sun after the software divisions had been retained by the highest bidder. But really, all us outsiders have is the analysis, not the actual inside information about any particular company's strategy.
Other thoughts on Oracle Posted Aug 18, 2010 1:31 UTC (Wed) by russell (subscriber, #10458) [Link]
I'd drool over a python based android. But that's probably very expensive to change now. Wouldn't it?
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