“Oracle today announced it’s completed the acquisition of K-Splice, **dropping support for Redhat, CentOS, and SUSE, **and closing doors to new customers. Unless of course you want to become an Oracle Linux Premier Support subscriber — then it comes as standard.”
Customer Letter | Oracle and Ksplice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksplice
Since Ksplice used to be open source, I expect a fork pretty soon.
Oracle isn’t even capable of killing open source.
Hi
Depends, because it’s GPL someone will fork it (Maybe that’s what they want… 
)
So it gets forked and the open source community works on it, oracle can then take those updates and use themselves, it’s no different than SLES, RedHat. They make further modifications, this modified source will be available to paying/subscribed customers…
Windows is in dire need of ksplice.
I didn’t say they could, just that they’re trying very hard to do so. Java, Open Office, MySQL, Ksplice, the list keeps growing.
Oracle is in the business of making money.
No other consideration applies.
On Sat, 23 Jul 2011 14:46:02 +0000, eionmac wrote:
> Oracle is in the business of making money. No other consideration
> applies.
Well, if they did make other considerations, they might make more money.
I know people who won’t buy from Oracle because of how they treat the
open source community.
Just like there were people who decided Novell was evil when they signed
the deal with Microsoft and thus wouldn’t do business with them.
Jim
–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C
Agree with you and others who said the same thing. The open source community will create a fork and i suspect that it will receive help from major “linux players” like RedHat to grow 
Blame Sun and the ksplice project. I don’t know what Sun really expected when they sold to Oracle, but ksplice knew very well.
Sun had problems working out how to deal with open source. Back in 1999 or 2000 (not sure which), they closed down their solaris-x86 project. But they later recognized that was a mistake, and reopened it. They eventually went with an open source version of solaris. I think that could have worked, but they had put it off for too long and did not have the resources to carry it through. Their major mistake was to think that they were in the hardware business rather than in the software business.
Sun’s viewpoint was that they were mainly selling to the server community, and could ignore the individual users. And that was fundamentally flawed thinking. For the people who purchase servers started as individual users, and what they became familiar with as individual users was what guided their thinking in purchasing servers.
As best I can tell, Oracle seems determined to repeat all of the past mistakes of Sun.
On 07/24/2011 06:46 PM, nrickert wrote:
> As best I can tell, Oracle seems determined to repeat all of the past
> mistakes of Sun.
+1
–
DD
It’s sad. What an amazing opportunity. The weird thing to me is that despite companies like Red Hat showing they can make billions from Open Source, others refuse to acknowledge that possibility.
Linux was Novell’s one bright spot toward the end. There is money to be made, and it’s not in patent claims. Look at Android.
On 07/26/2011 10:26 PM, 6tr6tr wrote:
>
> Red Hat showing they can make billions from Open Source
_b_illions?
Q: if they earn a profit $2,199,322 every month (like they did in
February of this year…their most recent audited financial report
<http://investors.redhat.com/financials.cfm>) how many months will it
take them to make the first billion? and to get to billionS
A: 454 months (or 37 years and some days) to the first billion and
another 37 years to get to billionS
–
DD
Caveat-Hardware-Software
openSUSE®, the “German Engineered Automobiles” of operating systems!
Red Hat reached $1B in revenue for the first time last year. I think that’s what 6tr6tr has in mind.
Yes, that is. I guess I should have qualified that.
Also, IBM makes a ton of money working with open source every year. Google too, but of course the majority of their money is made from closed source (their search algorithms, etc).
On 07/26/2011 11:56 PM, chief sealth wrote:
>
> Red Hat reached $1B in revenue for the first time last year. I think
> that’s what 6tr6tr has in mind.
i guess the difference is in the definition of “make” in the “they can
make billions”…
to me, what a company can ‘make’ is the profit gleaned from the total
revenue stream…so, if they have $1B coming in and $997.8M going out in
pay, investments, losses, plant costs, advertising budgets, etc etc etc
then i define the ‘make’ as the difference between in and out…or the
$2.2M ‘made’ in last Feb…
but, i only took one business course, ever…and it was not accounting
(advertising)…
–
DD
Caveat-Hardware-Software
openSUSE®, the “German Engineered Automobiles” of operating systems!
DenverD wrote:
> On 07/26/2011 11:56 PM, chief sealth wrote:
>>
>> Red Hat reached $1B in revenue for the first time last year. I think
>> that’s what 6tr6tr has in mind.
>
> i guess the difference is in the definition of “make” in the “they can
> make billions”…
>
> to me, what a company can ‘make’ is the profit gleaned from the total
> revenue stream…so, if they have $1B coming in and $997.8M going out in
> pay, investments, losses, plant costs, advertising budgets, etc etc etc
> then i define the ‘make’ as the difference between in and out…or the
> $2.2M ‘made’ in last Feb…
>
> but, i only took one business course, ever…and it was not accounting
> (advertising)…
>
Just from a bookkeeping perspective.
Everything that is defined as the bottom line or profit is what you made
(really).
So it doesn’t matter if you made $1 or $1.000.000 Dollars. Whats left is
what matters.
And another important matter is, what the company does with the profit.
Re-invest or just pay out to shareholders which in my mind definse how
healthy a company is and what the future outlook is.
Just my thought.
–
Euer Komputerfriek Joerg
To address the problem in the title, I don’t think Oracle (Ellison in particular, but you probably won’t get an ecosystem of different ideas at the top of Oracle) cares at all whether Open Source lives or die, provides it doesn’t impact his short-term bottom line.
In particular, I emphasise short-term because I don’t believe Ellison necessarily behaves in his best interests in the long term, because he is very orientated towards the strategy that he feels gives him the greatest short term (or, just possibly, medium term) bottom line advantage, to the exclusion of other considerations. He probably would dismiss any discussion of longer term, bigger picture, considerations as touchy-feely nonsense, and a general lack of business sense and orientation (or something like that, with more aggressive language).
For him, as far as I can tell, it is all ‘money out, profits in’ and not building relationships, confidence in the community (open source, or otherwise), and if you have a product that people need, you can raise the price to the roof. He probably does consider giving away products, even if that has advantages for him, as ‘brain dead’.
I am sorry if I have got an unduly negative perception of the man (I think he’d consider what I have written as a broadly positive review), but, from what I have read, this seems a realistic assessment.
This is relevant: Oracle: Java’s worst enemy | Application Development - InfoWorld
One snippet:
Now we learn that Oracle knew about the Java SE 7 bug fully five days before it shipped the product. And yet it shipped anyway because five days wasn’t enough time to fix the problem.
I’m slapping my forehead here. Seriously? The Java community has been waiting five years for Java SE 7, but Oracle was so desperate to “move Java forward” that it couldn’t wait any longer, even when it knew it was going to ship a product that contained a major flaw?