Oracle shuts down open source test servers (iTnews)

[Posted July 29, 2010 by corbet]

Here's a report on iTnews saying that Oracle has abruptly shut down a set of servers used to perform quality assurance on PostgreSQL releases. "Sun Microsystems - and for a short time its new owner Oracle - had provided three member servers to ensure PostgreSQL was stable on the Solaris operating system. The development of PostgreSQL had been supported by Sun - which contributed DTrace support, amongst other features to the database platform. At the start of July, Oracle shut down its three PostgreSQL build farm servers without warning, leaving the PostgreSQL community rushing to find replacements."

Oracle shuts down open source test servers (iTnews)

Posted Jul 29, 2010 16:49 UTC (Thu) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link] (7 responses)

Who would be surprised ?
Just remove Oracle Solaris from the list of supported platforms.

Oracle shuts down open source test servers (iTnews)

Posted Jul 29, 2010 20:22 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (6 responses)

Unluckily, Solaris is the platform of choice for "Enterprise Databases"...

Oracle shuts down open source test servers (iTnews)

Posted Jul 29, 2010 20:34 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

Oracle is the company that will pull a server without further notice. And you want to rely on their complete platform with your enterprise's data? :-P

Oracle shuts down open source test servers (iTnews)

Posted Jul 30, 2010 5:06 UTC (Fri) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link] (3 responses)

Solaris was always the best underlayer for Oracle DB.
And now, certainly, Oracle Solaris is a vehicle to help sell Oracle DB.
What it has to do with PostgreSQL, I just don't know ... :>

Oracle shuts down open source test servers (iTnews)

Posted Jul 30, 2010 6:26 UTC (Fri) by nicooo (guest, #69134) [Link]

Maybe they don't want Solaris to be a vehicle to help sell PostgreSQL. Luckily for Oracle this won't generate much bad publicity now that they're being sued by the government.

Oracle shuts down open source test servers (iTnews)

Posted Jul 30, 2010 17:17 UTC (Fri) by joseph.h.garvin (guest, #64486) [Link] (1 responses)

Just out of curiosity, why was Solaris the best underlayer?

Oracle shuts down open source test servers (iTnews)

Posted Jul 31, 2010 10:27 UTC (Sat) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link]

Because of its sooo very serious and enterprisey look and feel.
At least I heard about that a lot.

Oracle shuts down open source test servers (iTnews)

Posted Jul 30, 2010 13:24 UTC (Fri) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link]

It's 2010 now.

Oracle shuts down open source test servers (iTnews)

Posted Jul 29, 2010 17:31 UTC (Thu) by mjr (guest, #6979) [Link] (2 responses)

No surprise indeed, but it wouldn't have hurt them that much to give some courteous notice.

Oracle shuts down open source test servers (iTnews)

Posted Jul 29, 2010 21:06 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (1 responses)

It wouldn't have hurt them at all to give courteous notice. Therefore, we may conclude that it was done with malice, or at least with contempt.

Incompetence or bureaucratic bungling is more likely

Posted Jul 30, 2010 0:07 UTC (Fri) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

Oracle is a huge bureaucracy. I think it far more likely that several layers of that bureaucracy miscommunicated, helped by middle managers who care about nothing but wielding bureaucratic power. Maybe someone looked to save some redundancy, someone else took it as a hint, found three servers doing nothing useful to Oracle, asked what they were, someone else saw a chance to brown nose, and so on down the line.

Oracle shuts down open source test servers (iTnews)

Posted Jul 29, 2010 22:16 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link] (7 responses)

Never attribute to malice that which could be explained by a mistake.

I can picture in my mind a sysadmin asking another:

"What are these boxes for? I cannot find anything about them in the maps left by the previous sysadmin."

"Dunno."

"Let's turn them off then, and see if anyone complains."

Oracle shuts down open source test servers (iTnews)

Posted Jul 30, 2010 2:11 UTC (Fri) by lambda (subscriber, #40735) [Link] (4 responses)

I've had that happen before, while working for a lab at a university, with our main server hosted in the university data center. They didn't know what our box was, so they just shut it off to see who would complain.

Oracle shuts down open source test servers (iTnews)

Posted Jul 30, 2010 3:04 UTC (Fri) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872) [Link] (3 responses)

That's a pretty standard thing to do in a data center, and that's why you should always, always label your servers with your email address and mobile phone number. That way, nicer admins might attempt to contact you before they unplug your equipment.

Oracle shuts down open source test servers (iTnews)

Posted Jul 30, 2010 21:55 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (2 responses)

Agreed, labeling servers is the bare minimum required to manage a computer room. Shutting down unlabeled boxes is great because it immediately makes the owner suffer the most from the lack of a label:

- My server is down!
- Which one is it?
- err....

Oracle shuts down open source test servers (iTnews)

Posted Jul 31, 2010 14:11 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Problem is when it's the datacentre that supplied the server, and didn't label it ...

Cheers,
Wol

Oracle shuts down open source test servers (iTnews)

Posted Jul 31, 2010 21:58 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Also when the label gets old and unreadable, or when someone goes around labelling all the servers in that room and slaps the label straight over the top of *your* label, obscuring it completely (yes, this really happened).

Oracle shuts down open source test servers (iTnews)

Posted Aug 2, 2010 6:30 UTC (Mon) by Nick (guest, #15060) [Link] (1 responses)

> Never attribute to malice that which could be explained by a mistake.

I don't like that saying, it was surely invented by malice-doers. Almost anything could be explained by a mistake, no matter how improbable. So this philosophy basically says everybody is a wonderful and good person but many people make lots of mistakes that strangely happen to align with their motives.

Oracle shuts down open source test servers (iTnews)

Posted Aug 2, 2010 7:07 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

give people the benefit of the doubt, at least initially.

taking the other extreme (assuming that anything that has a negative effect on you was a deliberate attack on you personally) is otherwise known as clinical paranoia ;-)

there is a grey area where there is no doubt left in the minds of some people, while there is still doubt in the minds of others what the motivation was for any action.

in this case, with the systems not being turned back on promptly, it moves from mistake to either incompetence or malice, but I'm not sure which yet.

Is it better to pay for services?

Posted Jul 30, 2010 8:36 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (1 responses)

It's great when a company provides a free resource such as a test server, but as this episode shows, free-of-charge services can be withdrawn at any time with little recourse. Perhaps if the Postgres project had made an agreement with Sun to pay a nominal fee of ten dollars a month in exchange for use of these servers, they would have been treated as a customer by the corporate machinery, and given better treatment.

Is it better to pay for services?

Posted Aug 5, 2010 20:14 UTC (Thu) by dafid_b (guest, #67424) [Link]

yep... but the company should not accept that contract - as it locks in the loss. An ongoing gift allows the company to stop at will - much like a typical US employment deal :).

The marginal cost of running 3 servers in the datacentre when u sell h/w is quite low. The benefit to SUN was another s/w system on their h/w platform :).

The world has changed: solaris and sun h/w are now used to sell oracle dbase licences. So the benefit of another credible dbase on solaris for oracle is hmm... probably not seen as a benefit at all.

It is sad that they did not give any notice; that is just bad PR.