Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun [LWN.net]

By Jonathan Corbet
April 20, 2009

Despite a steady stream of rumors, IBM did not, in the end, buy Sun Microsystems. But, on April 20, Oracle did. This acquisition could have some interesting implications for the Linux community. Your editor, while not really knowing more than anybody else, suspects that the outcome could be mostly positive. What follows, here, is some wild speculation on where this could all go.

Some months ago, your editor posted a slightly tongue-in-cheek article on a serious topic: what would happen if Sun Microsystems were to undergo a change in management which rendered the company far less friendly toward free software? It now appears that there will, indeed, be a management change. One might well worry what changes we might see in the newly-acquired company's attitude; Oracle is not always seen as the friendliest company in general. But Oracle, while being very much a proprietary software company, does seem to have a supportive approach toward free software. Your editor was reasonably well impressed by the talk given by Oracle "Chief Corporate Architect" Edward Screven at the recent Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. At some levels of the software stack, at least, Oracle seems genuinely interested in working with and growing the development community.

There are a number of specific topics of interest when speculating on what could happen; your editor will visit a few of them below.

MySQL. This project, of course, can be seen as being in direct competition with Oracle's flagship offering. So, unsurprisingly, a number of people have speculated that Oracle will not encourage its further growth. So, perhaps, Oracle will de-emphasize the project or "return it to the community." But that is not necessarily how things will go.

One should remember that this isn't the first time Oracle has been seen to threaten MySQL through acquisition. Back in 2005, Oracle bought Innobase, the creator of the InnoDB storage engine used by MySQL. The MySQL project wisely branched away from InnoDB, but the fact of the matter is that this code is still free software, and InnoDB releases continue to happen. The sky did not fall after all.

Beyond that, there is the simple matter that MySQL appears to earn money. This acquisition could well be an opportunity for Oracle to gain revenue from customers who, for whatever reason, are not interested in buying Oracle licenses. It broadens the company's database product line and might provide the opportunity to encourage some customers to move toward the more expensive, proprietary offerings.

Most interesting, though, will be to see what happens with the MySQL development community. Oracle still does not have vast amounts of experience running large, community-oriented projects, but it seems to be learning. The MySQL community is not in top condition, currently; it has suffered from Sun's legendary heavy hand, leading to a fair amount of developer unhappiness. There are currently a few active forks out there, raising the possibility that control over the "real" MySQL could move out of Sun's hands altogether. Oracle could, just maybe, woo these developers back into a core MySQL project which was managed in a more community-oriented manner. If that were to happen, it would be hard to conclude that this acquisition was anything but good for MySQL.

Solaris. This operating system is said, in the press release, to be one of the core justifications for the acquisition. Oracle sells a fair number of licenses for deployments on Solaris; it cannot be unhappy with the idea of gaining control over the full platform. The real question here, perhaps, is whether Oracle sees Solaris as a system with a long future ahead of it, or whether Solaris becomes a legacy platform which will be supported for some time, but which will not see a great deal of development.

There have been suggestions for a while that Sun is reconsidering its licensing choices. A GPL-licensed Solaris was not entirely out of the question before the acquisition; quite possibly, those chances have improved now. A relicensed Solaris, preferably combined with some clarity on patent licensing, could make it possible for technologies like ZFS and Dtrace to move into Linux. Whether Linux would want them is a separate discussion, though.

There is an alternative, of course: Oracle could decide to promote Solaris as an (incompatibly-licensed) competitor to Linux and reduce its involvement on the Linux side. Your editor, perhaps naively, sees this outcome as unlikely. Oracle has invested heavily enough in Linux to create a real impression of believing in the platform. Oracle has not invested in Solaris (which is also free software, remember) at anything close to the same level. If Oracle were to to try to push Solaris as a better alternative to Linux, it would really just be continuing Sun's strategy. Presumably there are people in Oracle smart enough to wonder why Oracle would have any more success with that approach than Sun did.

Btrfs. Edward Screven claimed that Oracle was pursuing Btrfs because it likes the technology better than it likes ZFS. Ownership of ZFS could well put that claim to the test, but there does not appear to be any reason to believe that it was not sincere. The early word from Oracle is that plans for Btrfs have not changed, and that the resources put into that project will not decrease.

Java. The press release states that Java "is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired." Much Oracle-based software is written in Java, so there are clear advantages in having control over that part of the software stack. Increasingly, customers can just go to Oracle and get support for most of the major components they use from a single source. That, presumably, will help make some money for Oracle.

OpenOffice.org. This project looks like a bit of a strange fit in Oracle, which is not really a desktop software company. Still, Oracle may see value in keeping this project going as a way to encourage corporate desktop users away from Microsoft products. With any luck at all, Oracle will work to turn OpenOffice.org into a more community-oriented project. By making participation in OpenOffice.org so hard, Sun has spurned the offers of assistance which have come from around the community. Maybe Oracle will be a bit smarter and will realize that, by opening things up a bit, it can speed the development of OpenOffice.org without really having to invest more into the project. One can always hope.

What it comes down to is that just about anything could happen. It could be that this acquisition is part of a long-term plan by Oracle to acquire just enough of the free software community to neutralize any threats it sees. Now that this hypothetical plan is coming to fruition (lacking, perhaps, just the occasionally-rumored acquisition of Red Hat), Oracle can proceed to move away from Linux, turn things proprietary, and generally prepare itself for the Final Battle. This would not be a good outcome for the Linux community, though we would, as usual, end up stronger once the dust had settled.

Alternatively, Oracle may have understood that truly free software can help to turn its competitors' products into commodities while enabling Oracle to provide a solid offering around its own products. This company, which has already become one of the top Linux kernel contributors, could become the top contributor to free software projects as a whole (a title which Sun has already claimed). If Oracle sustains Sun's projects in a more community-oriented mode, we may well conclude, one year from now, that this acquisition was a good thing indeed.

to post comments

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 20, 2009 22:10 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

I hope that Oracle at last starts real JVM development. It's been stagnated for a looooooong time now. Java7 won't have a lot of expected features, and it is not even close to release! It's like a Windows Vista of Java world now.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 0:22 UTC (Tue) by lakeland (guest, #1157) [Link]

Java is Oracle's preferred method of implementing stored procedures. The database has its own JVM which (in my opinion) had been stagnating and falling behind LINQ + .NET. An injection of effort into this could be interesting, turning Java into a first class database language.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 22, 2009 2:50 UTC (Wed) by gnu_andrew (guest, #49515) [Link] (1 responses)

Hardly. Development on HotSpot is very active, is now finally out in the open and I believe the changes in the OpenJDK7 HotSpot tree have made their way back into the proprietary Sun Update releases for JDK6. If anything, things have improved.

As to the delay with *Java* 1.7 (as opposed to Sun's implementation, the JDK) this has been delayed by the mess that is the JCP and the deadlock between Apache and Sun over Harmony and TCK licensing. We can only hope Oracle can improve on this situation; there is certainly plenty of scope!

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 22, 2009 4:12 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

> deadlock between Apache and Sun over Harmony and TCK licensing

I still find it quite amusing that Apache's new Java implementation effort was named "Harmony".
They claimed the purpose of the project was to bring all existing efforts together, and yet chose
a license which disallowed cooperation with any of the existing (long underway!) free Java
implementation efforts...and thus ended up starting a new Java implementation from scratch.

Every time I see the project mentioned, I chuckle at the sheer gall of it. It was quite a masterful
fake-out: they even had the Classpath developers tricked into thinking they actually wanted
cooperation, for a while.

And given such, I'm really not surprised that Apache is causing a deadlock in JCP...seems pretty
much par for the course. "Yes, we really want to cooperate with you. Really. Just do everything
exactly on our terms, it will be great!"

Sigh.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 20, 2009 22:12 UTC (Mon) by vivo (subscriber, #48315) [Link] (5 responses)

more like
UPDATE `Sun` SET owner="Oracle";

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 20, 2009 23:18 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

SELECT employee FROM oracle LEFT JOIN sun ON (employee.task IN ('Java', 'Solaris'))

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 0:28 UTC (Tue) by emak (guest, #488) [Link] (3 responses)

BEGIN;

INSERT INTO oracle (SELECT interesting_stuff FROM sun WHERE likely_to_make_money = 1);

DROP sun;

COMMIT;

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 8:03 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

You want PostgreSQL for that there transctional DDL. Oracle can't do
it. ;)

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 20:47 UTC (Tue) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] (1 responses)

Yet another reason to prefer Postgres, then!

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 21:51 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Oh god yes. I work with Oracle's RDBMS every day and I would give *so*
much to be able to use PostgreSQL instead. But big banks are scared of it
(and I suppose it probably doesn't scale quite as well either).

GPLv3

Posted Apr 20, 2009 22:49 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (23 responses)

If Oracle wants to put the cat among the pigeons it could license OpenSolaris under the GPLv3. That might turn heads and shake up the allegedly relatively stagnant OpenSolaris scene.

GPLv3

Posted Apr 21, 2009 2:00 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (22 responses)

Why do you think so? Switching to GPLv3 wouldn't really do anything about the primary issue people have with OpenSolaris's licencing, ie the fact that it's incompatible with the Linux kernel's. It might be enough to cause some GPLv3 advocates to change focus, but I don't really see it causing any major shift in the market. Switching to GPLv2 would be more interesting, but even then I suspect that the most likely outcome would be rapid asset stripping of anything useful from Solaris into Linux. Much as it may irk me that Sun deliberately chose a Linux-incompatible licence for OpenSolaris, it still seems that it was the only way to maintain any sort of relevance.

GPLv3

Posted Apr 21, 2009 3:26 UTC (Tue) by shieldsd (guest, #20198) [Link] (21 responses)

If Oracle relicenses Solaris under GPLv3 then within a matter of months every part of Solaris that could strengthen Linux will be incorporated into Linux.

GPLv3

Posted Apr 21, 2009 3:33 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (9 responses)

Except for the bits in the kernel - the Linux kernel is GPLv2 only, not GPLv2 or later. You can't combine GPLv2 and GPLv3 code. And, really, who'd want the Solaris userspace?

GPLv3

Posted Apr 21, 2009 8:07 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

You mean you don't want a grep that dumps core if you use too many
alternations? Whyever not?

;)

GPLv3

Posted Apr 21, 2009 14:00 UTC (Tue) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link]

And still.. in the 21st century, can't operate recursively.

GPLv3

Posted Apr 21, 2009 13:31 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link] (6 responses)

Linus has left open the decision to (try to) move to a later GPL version. (It will still be a legal tough job to find all people, tho.)

GPLv3

Posted Apr 21, 2009 21:19 UTC (Tue) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624) [Link] (5 responses)

Or dead... :-(

GPLv3

Posted Apr 21, 2009 21:22 UTC (Tue) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624) [Link] (1 responses)

[Sigh - ENOCOFFEE.. meant to be following on from the comment on finding
all contributors and say]

..especially the dead ones.. :-(

GPLv3

Posted Apr 23, 2009 3:02 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

If a developer dies, then the copyrights would be passed on to their heirs. It'd still be possible to change the license, but the new copyright holder might not be as interested.

GPLv3

Posted Apr 23, 2009 8:39 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

So has anyone ever asked an actual lawyer about this? If a large project with very widely distributed ownership, makes every reasonable effort to locate its current owners as well as to widely publicise a pending licence change, and if years later a very small percentage of copyright holders crawl out of the wood-work and object, would a judge really rule in favour of those few, against the thousands?

I don't know the answer, but the implied answer assumed all the time by Linux kernel folk seems to take it as given that the courts would be surprisingly unpragmatic.

GPLv3

Posted Apr 30, 2009 9:08 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] (1 responses)

It is only necessary to find those copyright owners who explicitely said they were only supporting GPLv2. The "GPLv2 only" tag in the COPYING file from Linus is only telling you that "the whole work is GPLv2 only by least common denominator". AFAIK, all GPLv2-only proponents are vocal and easy to track down. Large parts of the kernel are GPLv2 or later, and so can be changed to GPLv3 without asking the copyright holders of those parts (e.g. the ALSA team).

Of course it is a lot easier to switch to GPLv3 or later if you were GPLv2 or later before. Been there, done that. Simply changing the COPYING file is sufficient.

GPLv3

Posted Apr 30, 2009 10:40 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

No - given that the default assumption in the kernel is that it's GPLv2, it's the ones who explicitly say GPLv2 or later who are the exception. Patches to any files that are v2 only are also v2 only. Large parts of the kernel may be v2 or later, but the majority is v2 only. It follows that you have a large number of copyright holders to find.

It'll be the other way

Posted Apr 21, 2009 7:38 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (10 responses)

You can not incorporate bits from GPLv3 Solaris in Linux. You CAN incorporate bits of Linux in GPLv3: if you'll actually bother to check you'll find out that surprisingly high number of files in Linux is licensed "under GPLv2 or later". Some core files are licensed under "GPLv2 only", but these are not really suitable for Solaris: architecture is too different, so this switch is logical - I don't know why Sun decided against it...

It'll be the other way

Posted Apr 21, 2009 8:45 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

I agree. Opensolaris could really use some hardware support from Linux. Not so much the other way around.

It'll be the other way

Posted Apr 21, 2009 11:34 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

It's nice to see that somebody gets my point, here. There would have been a number of advantages, both pragmatic and ideological had Sun adopted GPLv3 for OpenSolaris upon the finalisation of that licence, notably the strengthened patent language in the licence compared to GPLv2 (which recent events show to be moderately useful, even if Sun arguably wanted to sit on the fence with regard to their own patents), and as already noted, the ability to adopt GPLv2-or-later-licensed code from Linux, thus addressing one of the largest and longest running complaints about Solaris on x86 when compared to the Free UNIX variants: hardware and driver support.

It'll be the other way

Posted Apr 21, 2009 14:01 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (4 responses)

Something like a third of the files under drivers/ are under an "or later" license, but ignoring the irrelevant (things like MCA drivers, other code mostly aimed at dead hardware, embedded drivers for platforms Solaris doesn't support, drivers for hardware Solaris already supports and so on) you basically end up with some sata and scsi drivers, a bunch of v4l code and some wireless drivers. And, in a lot of the more useful and relevant of these cases, there's already support in the BSDs that could be used without having to change the license.

The rest of the code is under pure GPLv2, and in many cases that includes infrastructure code that's relied upon by some of the "or later" drivers. You'd need to implement chunks of Linux's driver API while demonstrating that you hadn't copied any code from Linux, so that would immediately require a clean room reengineering effort. The alternative would be to port every one of the drivers you're interested in, and if you're making the argument that there's a sufficiently large body of drivers for Solaris to benefit from a license change then that would also be a lot of work.

So no, I don't see Solaris gaining any significant benefit by changing the license to GPLv3. It'd just end up looking like a petty "We're happy to take your code, but you don't get any of ours" move.

It'll be the other way

Posted Apr 23, 2009 11:23 UTC (Thu) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link] (3 responses)

Why would you need a cleanroom approach? Linux isn't proprietary. It doesn't implement trade secrets. You only have to worry about accusations of plagiarism, effectively.

The reason BIOSes and such needed cleanroom reimplementations was due to the fact they were covered by copyright *and* trade secret laws. You need independent reinvention to prove you didn't steal trade secrets, and to argue against copyright infringement in cases where the resulting code ended up being the same.

But, since you have the GPL code right there, you can ensure your reimplementation isn't the same as the original except for the most trivial subsets of code. And you don't have to worry about trade secrets. There are none in publicly available code by definition.

It'll be the other way

Posted Apr 23, 2009 13:35 UTC (Thu) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link] (2 responses)

Clean-room reengineering has nothing to do with trade secrets. Trade secrets are protected by NDAs or by agreements that disallow reverse-engineering (where this is valid). The purpose of clean-room reengineering is to ensure that the authors of the new implementation cannot plausibly be accused of copying the original (since they have not seen it). The risk of being wrongly accused of copying applies regardless of whether the original was distributed in binary or source form; in fact distribution of the source increases the risk to a reimplementer since it would be so much easier for them to copy it.

It'll be the other way

Posted Apr 23, 2009 14:50 UTC (Thu) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link] (1 responses)

Copyright applies to the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. If I reimplement an idea, it doesn't matter if I have access to someone else's expression of an idea. For example, if I see one movie about an asteroid hitting the Earth, that doesn't stop me from making my own movie about an asteroid hitting the Earth. Copyright doesn't protect the idea.

The same applies to the ideas embodied in source code. That means the algorithms, the APIs, etc. I can use the source code as a definitive reference to how it works.

But, there may be specific ideas embedded in that code. For example, there may be some whizzy algorithms that allow it to operate efficiently, or cute optimizations that make for a compact implementation. Or, there may be behavioral quirks that are exposed in the API that are artifacts of the implementation. How something implemented is a secret if you choose to keep it a secret. (This is why AT&T header files in SVR4 say that the code is unpublished proprietary source that is property of AT&T. See also Data General vs. Digital Controls Corporation.)

The Phoenix BIOS vs. IBM BIOS clean room reimplementation was trying to avoid copyright infringement claims in addition to trade secret claims. For such a small piece of performance critical code, it's likely that the implementations will look very similar with only superficial differences. IBM could plausibly claim the code was copied and modified lightly rather than reimplemented unless Phoenix could point to an airtight process that prevents that. We're talking 8K bytes of object code here, so the odds of this happening are high.

For something much larger and higher level than x86 assembly code, there is much more room for unique expression of the ideas embodied in the code. As long as it isn't directly plagiarized (ie. copied with only trivial changes), I don't see how any court could argue that a reimplementation (distinct re-expression of the ideas) would be a copyright violation.

So, I'll go back to my original point: You don't need a clean room to reimplement GPL code. You just need to reimplement it. You won't hit trade secret issues, nor will you hit copyright issues if you re-express the ideas in the original code in your own way.

It'll be the other way

Posted Apr 24, 2009 1:08 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

You assume that there are always multiple sensible ways of representing the code. If you hit a case where this isn't true, you either end up writing obfuscated code in order to avoid direct copying or you potentially end up with an awkward lawsuit. Safer to just clean room it.

It'll be the other way

Posted Apr 21, 2009 15:05 UTC (Tue) by southey (guest, #9466) [Link] (2 responses)

Unfortunately the usage of "GPLv2 or later" is very misleading because you can NOT change the license of code unless you are the copyright owner of it. Thus, when distributing everything (since that is really when the terms kick in), that "GPLv2 or later" code would most likely remain under the original license. This creates problems if the terms of GPLv2 conflict with the terms of the licenses of other code like GPLv3 defeating the purpose of mixing GPLv2 and GPLv3 code.

It'll be the other way

Posted Apr 21, 2009 16:16 UTC (Tue) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

You may not change the license stipulated by the copyright holder of the file, but the effective license that applies when GPLv2+ and GPLv3 code is shipped together is GPLv3. The file itself would still be GPLv2+.

This is FUD - plain and simple

Posted Apr 21, 2009 20:25 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Take a look on OpenSSL. There are some files under 2-3 compatible licenses. No problems whatsoever - except bloat: now every file must carry few headers. The same with GPLv3: you can not remove original permission header with "GPLv2 or later", but you can safely attach new header before or after that'll say "all changes can only be distributed under GPLv3 or later".

The effective result is GPLv3: to use GPLv2 you need to split the hair and remove "GPLv3 or later" code from the file. If introduced change is not trivial (and for trivial change there are no need to touch header at all - old "GPLv2 or later" copy is still around somewhere, right?) it's very hard.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 20, 2009 22:50 UTC (Mon) by dw (subscriber, #12017) [Link] (19 responses)

Does anyone have thoughts on what may become of SPARC? It seems to me that Sun's hardware interests are likely to be sold or killed off.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 3:28 UTC (Tue) by shieldsd (guest, #20198) [Link] (15 responses)

One reason to keep SPARC would be to use the skills of the SPARC designers to create custom hardware, to create an "app killing" engine that would optimize the cost/performance of a stack consisting of 11g, MySQL, and Solaris/Linux to support providing cloud-based services

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 6:17 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (13 responses)

Won't happen. It's been proven time and time again since the 80s: it's all about process. If you care about performance, you must go with the high-volume, off the shelf CPU. Apple learned it with PowerPC, Intel/HP learned it with Itanium, and Sun has learned it multiple times over. We'll see if Larrabee and Cell can buck this trend but they're looking pretty weak so far.

Let's say you're Sun, you want a fast server chip, and you willing to give up single-core speed (what everyone else wants) to go massively multicore. You like the differentiation so you burn a ton of engineer time creating a custom chip and all the infrastructure that goes along with it.

Once you're shipping, you'll find that Intel has already smoked you. Happens every time. They just take a rusty, decades-old design, update it, shrink it, and fab it on a process you won't be able to use for years. And now their $400 chip blows the doors off your custom $1600 silicon for all but the most synthetic workloads.

I agree, we'll see servers become far more specialized to host modern workloads more efficiently. But, when it happens, the successful products will be x86 based. Alas.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 9:15 UTC (Tue) by kripkenstein (guest, #43281) [Link] (5 responses)

I agree that 'commodity' hardware will generally succeed. But, not always, and there are niches worth exploiting. For example, you mentioned PowerPC, and PowerPC in fact does well... on consoles. Which is a market worth being in.

A top-to-bottom solution - Oracle hardware, Oracle OS, Oracle middleware, Oracle DB - will have its place. It'll be a small, but lucrative part of the market. Oracle will at the same time not ignore the bigger market, including Linux. That's my guess.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 12:00 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (4 responses)

> I agree that 'commodity' hardware will generally succeed. But, not always, and there are niches worth exploiting.

A few other non-x86 hardware "niches" are doing not too bad: think for instance GPUs or mobile phone processors (more units sold than x86).

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 16:45 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (3 responses)

Maybe I wasn't explicit enough about "if you care about performance..."

Obviously ARM, Mips and PowerPC are doing wonderfully in engine computers, industrial control, mobile phones, access points, etc. Why? Because generally the most important factor is power consumption or ruggednes, not raw horsepower. It makes perfect sense to use custom silicon in these applications.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 20:51 UTC (Tue) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] (2 responses)

POWER/PowerPC also sees a lot of use on high-performance supercomputers. BlueGene/L, for instance, uses POWER5 processors on its compute nodes.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 22, 2009 0:15 UTC (Wed) by leoc (guest, #39773) [Link]

And don't forget video game systems. Every Wii, Playstation 3, and XBOX 360 have a PowerPC based CPU inside.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 22, 2009 4:08 UTC (Wed) by ebs (guest, #30411) [Link]

No, BlueGene/L uses PowerPC 440-based chips, not Power5

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 10:17 UTC (Tue) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] (1 responses)

Apple learned it with PowerPC, Intel/HP learned it with Itanium, and Sun has learned it multiple times over. We'll see if Larrabee and Cell can buck this trend but they're looking pretty weak so far.

Never leave Big Blue out of the analysis. ;-)

Oracle is not selling a general purpose system, and my guess is that they will not miss this opportunity to shape an OS to the needs of its flagship product. They must be dreaming of selling and servicing the datacenter-in-a-box, and obviously, IBM is the big competitor here. But I don't think Oracle care as much about the box as IBM does: they will not even try to beat IBM with better and faster processors. If they keep Sun's hardware division, it will be for integration purposes, not differentiation.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 23, 2009 19:22 UTC (Thu) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link]

> it will be for integration purposes, not differentiation.

That may be the calculus of the thing.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 13:02 UTC (Tue) by gouyou (guest, #30290) [Link] (1 responses)

If you care about performance, you must go with the high-volume, off the shelf CPU.

That explains the success of a number of FPGA solutions ... A generic CPU is good for generic tasks but using dedicated hardware can really accelerate some workloads.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 15:42 UTC (Tue) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link]

FPGA is anything but dedicated hardware... It's as generic as it gets.
It's the high-volume, off the shelf replacement for "dedicated" hardware.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 23, 2009 13:18 UTC (Thu) by davecb (subscriber, #1574) [Link] (2 responses)

Actually Intel is close to a monoculture, and without AMD, IBM and Sun, would wander off into dark corners like the the IAPX432 (shudder) and Itanium (unobtanium?), without a presence in the 64-socket-and-above space where Oracle sells a lot of product.

Right now, if you want a big box to run something like eBay or PayPal on, you buy Sun SPARC or IBM Power chips.

In the future, I speculate you'll see AMD competing in the NUMA space with 32- and 64-socket systems, implementing the heaviest-used subset of the x86-64instruction set and faulting to emulate the leftover dreck (;-))

--dave

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 23, 2009 17:28 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

This is a very good point. Without the competition from AMD, we'd probably still be waiting for the hardware virtualization and 64bit extensions. I'm pretty sure Intel wanted to use 64bit as an opportunity to move its customers to a more patent-protected architecture. Way to go AMD!

Not sure Sparc has really motivated Intel much...? Every Sparc I've ever used has been large, hot, and slow for real-world workloads. But maybe I'm just scarred from having to lug around a Tadpole for a year.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 23, 2009 18:17 UTC (Thu) by davecb (subscriber, #1574) [Link]

Ironic: I used a Tadpole until last fall, when I
blew the screen.

I think it's probably fair to say that SPARC
and Power were merely goads to Intel, showing
them a mid-range and high-end that they
couldn't achieve. AMD is a punch straight to
the eye (;-))

--dave

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 22, 2009 12:12 UTC (Wed) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link]

Why would this be more successful than Procket Networks, where a group left Sun's SPARC team to create a 40Gbps network processor?

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 4:12 UTC (Tue) by wilreichert (guest, #17680) [Link] (2 responses)

I gotta say the few projects I've been on involving niagra cpus have left me copmpletely underwhelmed. Running a highly parallel database might work well, but when my 3 year old laptop can compile java 5 times faster than an umpteen thousand dollar server something just aint right.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 23, 2009 2:36 UTC (Thu) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link] (1 responses)

Your comment reminds me of the people back in the days of Cray who commented on how the unix shell on the machines seemed slower than on small workstations.

The idea of specialized hardware is that it's specialized for very specific tasks. It will be exceedingly good at them but may suck at everything else.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 23, 2009 13:29 UTC (Thu) by davecb (subscriber, #1574) [Link]

In particular, the T5240 is far better that
the faster M5000 at anything which is sensitive
to needing an immediate dispatch without
latency, such as web services. It's slightly
slower at running multi-threaded but compute-intensive
middleware, and slower at any single-threaded or
compute-intensive task in direct proportion to clock speed.

--dave

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 0:08 UTC (Tue) by mrjk (subscriber, #48482) [Link]

Sun has a lot of parts. I wonder about the StorageTek division? Are some of these going to be sold
off? I know there are a lot of Fortune 500 businesses on Sparc-Solaris-Oracle-Storagetek.
Interesting times. I suspect this reshuffling isn't over. How is this going to affect Big SAN. I mean
Sun resold a lot of Hitachi. So how will relations get with the other big Storage companies that run
Oracle?

Quite the interesting realignment is going to happen in the enterprise space I think.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 1:10 UTC (Tue) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link] (6 responses)

I suspect that code quality is a bigger problem with community participation in OpenOffice than anything Sun did. Who wants to wallow around in mud in their spare time for no money?

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 3:30 UTC (Tue) by shieldsd (guest, #20198) [Link] (1 responses)

Solaris has attracted only a handful of non-Sun developers since it went "open source" a couple of years back. The community will go only if Solaris is licensed under GPL or a GPL-compatible license such as BSD. Otherwise, Solaris will remain an albatross around its new owner's neck.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 3:31 UTC (Tue) by shieldsd (guest, #20198) [Link]

s/community will go/community will grow/

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 14:55 UTC (Tue) by dilinger (subscriber, #2867) [Link] (3 responses)

People still hack on X, don't they? :)

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 15:24 UTC (Tue) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm pretty sure Keith Packard and friends are getting paid by someone, but look at the dramatic increase in community interest in X.org that's come from them refactoring and modularizing the codebase.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 18:22 UTC (Tue) by knobunc (guest, #4678) [Link]

The inimitable Mr. Packard works at Intel (since August 2006). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Packard

-ben

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 22, 2009 8:30 UTC (Wed) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]

Modularisation has indeed been the revitalising force in x.org. Instead if a huuuge swamp of code to dive into, developers can pick the module they are interested in and modify just that.

OOo is in order of magnitude larger swamp. If you get the idea of fixing some trivial looking import error from a .doc file, you'll give up before finding the code that deals with the error you are looking at..

Good news for Open-Source and Sun employees

Posted Apr 21, 2009 1:31 UTC (Tue) by shieldsd (guest, #20198) [Link] (3 responses)

I see this as good news both for Sun's current employees and open-source in general.

Sun's key open-source related assets are Java, Solaris, MySQL and Open Office. Oracle will get to pick and choose where to invest.

Open Office has the least strategic interest, so Oracle's best move would be to completely open it up and let the community and other vendors take it over. This would buy Oracle some good will it could cash in during its move with the other asserts.

thanks,dave

Good news for Open-Source and Sun employees

Posted Apr 21, 2009 19:30 UTC (Tue) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link] (2 responses)

> Sun's key open-source related assets are Java, Solaris, MySQL and Open
Office.

And VirtualBox I would guess: http://www.virtualbox.org/

From the article you referenced:
> In its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle sees a technology company
that is a software gem, skillful in computer design and ripe for
cost-cutting.
...
industry analysts estimated that Oracle’s cost savings from Sun operations
suggest job cuts of up to 10,000 workers from Sun’s payroll of more than
30,000.

My guess: Oracle sells OpenOffice to IBM. Hmm... or maybe MicroSoft would
be willing to pay more?

Good news for Open-Source and Sun employees

Posted Apr 21, 2009 20:37 UTC (Tue) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link]

My guess: Oracle sells OpenOffice to IBM.

This could actually happen... Of course, IBM has devoted lots of resources to Lotus Symphony; perhaps Symphony and OOo could combine forces to take on Microsoft Office...

Hmm... or maybe MicroSoft would be willing to pay more?

This is a near-impossibility. Hell would freeze over sooner. I just can't see MS buying a competitive product to their cash-cow office suite. If they did so it'd be to simply extinguish OOo (bypassing the extend and embrace phases). OOo would fork faster than a Windows box blue-screening.

Good news for Open-Source and Sun employees

Posted Apr 23, 2009 11:31 UTC (Thu) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]

My guess: Oracle sells OpenOffice to IBM. Hmm... or maybe MicroSoft would be willing to pay more?

And that'd pass antitrust muster how? (Referring to the Microsoft part.)

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 4:09 UTC (Tue) by jeremiah (subscriber, #1221) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm not to worried about Java, but I am curious about how this will effect netbeans? Does oracle use
a netbeans based system or an eclipse based system for this development products. Back in the day
they were using their own thing I think. This really seems to put oracle on a competative angle
towards IBM more than anyone else. Storage, hardware, development, db, a really turnkey kinda
solution for people whit too much money o know better.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 30, 2009 14:17 UTC (Thu) by oblio (guest, #33465) [Link]

Oracle has its own development tools, most of them sluggish and ugly, barely usable from my point of view. I don't think they'll give them up that easily (maybe merge them with Sun's over the long term? who knows?).

Off topic:
Try to use a spellchecker for your comments, for example Firefox 3 comes with one. Your comment is hard to read, because of all the mistakes. I'm not a native speaker, so don't shoot! :)

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 10:02 UTC (Tue) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (2 responses)

I've seen a lot of people blogging that this is better than IBM; I remain a bit unconvinced: both Oracle and IBM are extremely good at doing the things which benefit them, and vice-versa. Oracle's luke-warm/non-existent interest in stuff like OOo in the past surely won't change much - they're not involved in ODF, they don't even support OOo integration with their projects.

Are Oracle going to be better or worse custodians of projects than Sun? Who knows; I suspect there will be little change. I don't see them spending time on things which won't earn them money, which probably puts OOo in most danger - but also the project which stands to gain the most from this deal, because if Oracle start pushing it into large enterprises it will quickly have to become a lot better than it is now.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 22, 2009 18:15 UTC (Wed) by jmmc (guest, #34939) [Link] (1 responses)

> I've seen a lot of people blogging that this is better than IBM; I remain > a bit unconvinced:

my thoughts as well. I thought IBM was the better purchaser/match and still do (did). The fate of OOo was the first thought that struck me when I heard Oracle was the buyer. Imho, I might have trusted IBM engineering to refactor/document the OO codebase more so than Oracle. But indeed, as far as projecting OO into the SME enterprise, Oracle probably has the more forceful organization for that at this point. We'll see.

Monolithic code

Posted Apr 22, 2009 21:13 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Aw, if IBM were to refactor OOo as well as with Eclipse then we were doomed. I love the IDE but the code internals suck big time.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 13:29 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

Well mysql has to live on. Simply because 1. I do not feel like running a monster db like Oracle on home hardware, 2. its somewhat unique SQL syntax.

btrfs should be continued too. It can improve on the nits that have popped up with zfs over time.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 13:44 UTC (Tue) by jbaietto (subscriber, #43322) [Link]

Any idea about the future of VirtualBox?

April Showers for IBM, May FLowers for Oracle.

Posted Apr 21, 2009 16:29 UTC (Tue) by shieldsd (guest, #20198) [Link] (1 responses)

See

http://daveshields.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/april-showers...

thanks,dave

April Showers for IBM, May FLowers for Oracle.

Posted Apr 23, 2009 8:15 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

Dave, please, this is not an announcement board for your blog. What does posting just this link contribute, as a *comment*, to the LWN article? IMNSHO, nothing.

If you have a substantial comment or want to add something to the *discussion*, simply do it by posting text. If you wrote an *essay* or an opinion piece of your own on the Sun/Oracle deal, try to give it to Jonathan as an article if it's good enough. Otherwise keep it off -- this is LWN.net, not your site. You can also post it to /. if you want, that's a better place.

Thanks, Joachim

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 21, 2009 21:28 UTC (Tue) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624) [Link]

Two more things:

1) I presume that Oracle have also bought the NetApp/Sun WAFL/ZFS software
patent lawsuit too ?

2) Sun recently won a big HPC deal here in Australia; Oracle are not known
for their HPC hardware offerings; if they decide to stick to just the
profitable hardware I wonder if they will be able to provide the sort of
long term support it'll need ?

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 22, 2009 14:23 UTC (Wed) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (1 responses)

Oracle has invested heavily enough in Linux to create a real impression of believing in the platform. Oracle has not invested in Solaris (which is also free software, remember) at anything close to the same level

That is true, but is the past. If this transaction closes, Oracle will have retroactively invested billions in Solaris.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 22, 2009 20:18 UTC (Wed) by ArbitraryConstant (guest, #42725) [Link]

The question is, what benefit do they get from funding ongoing development of Solaris.

On Linux they can get features they want simply by funding them, but they don't have to fund everything, and they get the vast majority of maintenance and so forth for free. Given that, what's the benefit for switching everything they can over to Solaris?

Even if they now own Solaris, competing against Linux as a commodity OS is a death sentence. Oracle's value proposition comes from the products they sell on top of the OS, not the OS itself. Given that, I don't think it makes sense for them to be in the OS business.

I'll bet the same thing for Solaris that I do for SPARC: they put it into maintenance mode to fulfill their support obligations, and let it slowly fade away.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 23, 2009 6:21 UTC (Thu) by juhah (subscriber, #32930) [Link]

What this could mean to Red Hat? They have invested lot resources into Java (OpenJDK and JBoss).

Oracle's views on MySQL

Posted Apr 23, 2009 16:42 UTC (Thu) by cdmiller (guest, #2813) [Link]

On April 21'st I received an invite from Oracle to view a webinar all about how moving from MySQL to Oracle will reduce ones cost of ownership: "4/28 Lower Total Cost of Ownership with Oracle: Comparing Oracle to MySQL". Some company dude "will discuss how he gained a reliable, scalable, secure, and cost effective platform by moving from MySQL to Oracle". Is that an indication of Oracle's plans for MySQL?

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 23, 2009 17:14 UTC (Thu) by ssam (guest, #46587) [Link]

Linux could have ZFS now if someone put the work in.

I have never heard anyone say 'FAT32 in the Linux kernel is impossible until Microsoft release it as GPL'. The Linux devs just reimplemented it. the same for NTFS, HFS etc.

Oracle: SELECT * FROM Sun

Posted Apr 24, 2009 1:47 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

There is probably no need to worry about btrfs. The btrfs project has support from a number of other companies. If the worst happened, and Oracle pulled the plug on development, Chris might have to move to Red Hat. There is no way that Red Hat is going to let btrfs fall through the cracks.

http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-btrfs%40vger.kernel.org...