Rant, Oracle = bad

English Open Chat
1

Hi Guys. With the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle, software that I have come to appreciate now has a new owner.

Over time Sun gained respect in my quarter. They contributed a lot to desktop users by licensing Open Office for a free download. Similarly they purchased Virtualbox and released it on the net to gain market penetration and increase the user base. Solaris too was opened to development.

Oracle on the other hand is an unknown quantity. Since taking over the Sun portfolio they have not held out the hand of friendship. They ignore the Solaris Developers. They threaten Google with litigation. When the Oracle Inner Circle Newsletter hit my in box recently I decided to unsubscribe.
Actions speak louder than words. Oracle are telling us who they are and what they stand for.

Virtualbox has been my mainstay for a long time. But it is one of many Virtual Machines on the market. Is it time to revisit the Xen vm? What (other) virtual machine are you using on your OpenSuse box ?

2

cabernet wrote:

>
> Virtualbox has been my mainstay for a long time. But it is one of many
> Virtual Machines on the market. Is it time to revisit the Xen vm? What
> (other) virtual machine are you using on your OpenSuse box ?
>
I use vmware player 3.1 at the moment and vmware server 2.x in the past. It
depends on your needs. My reasons are

  1. I know vmware for some time, means I am too lazy for something new
  2. The company usues vmware workstation and this makes it easy to use an
    appliance on my own machine without trouble

I cannot comment on the oracle/sun question, until now I have not enough
information to see what this will change or not in the future (but I also
have some fears and doubts about that).

3

Virtualbox, Java, OpenOffice. It would be pretty difficult to avoid Oracle. As for me Oracle hasn’t been too bad so far, I just hope they don’t do to Sun what Google did to Youtube.

4

The lawsuit might indicate how serious they are about Java. OpenOffice helps their business, I think they even have their own fork. It has such a wide community it could never die, anyway. VirtualBox is like MySQL, it competes with their other product. I’m not sure they really want to see it continue. Reason #1 above is a good one to stick with it for now, but I’m sure Oracle will be pressuring people to move to their other VM.

5

They have another VM product? Is it one like Virtualbox or just a hypervisor?
Because Virtualbox is the only really free virtualization program (well there is Qemu but it’s not exactly the same) for desktop machines and it is wildly popular.
It would be incredibly stupid to kill it without something that matches it.

6

Maybe I’m wrong. I’m sure they had their own product before, but VB seems to be their main product now after doing some checking.

Because Virtualbox is the only really free virtualization program (well there is Qemu but it’s not exactly the same) for desktop machines and it is wildly popular.

MySQL has been very popular for database admin and development for a long time, but its future under Oracle is questionable. They’re a business and never have been friendly to OSS. They’re more concerned with profit margin than they are with popularity.

7

Any OpenSusers using Xen or KVM with a desktop interface ?

8

Qemu uses KVM for virtualization, but I’ve really only used Qemu for emulation. It does have some desktop interfaces, but the ones I’ve seen aren’t very good, you might have better luck though. As for Xen I have no idea.

9

Vmware, Mono, KOffice - how difficult is that ? Of course now you can argue that’s just exchanging one proprietary evil with another, but I think Oracle is much worse than the rest of them …

If you’re more FOSS- minded and have a recent CPU with virtualization support you can go for KVM instead of Vmware, and if you don’t want KDE references you can use Abiword / Gnumeric instead of KOffice, too.

Good Alternatives to Java as programming language are Python (more script- oriented) or of course C++.

10

In the same week Oracle has closed down Opensolaris, withdrawing it from the community, and sued Google over Java. Yeah, Oracle is wicked naughty. Learn from the solaris crowd. If you like something Sun released open source under gpl, then fork it now. If it has closed bits… open them asap.

11

As an additional comment about good and bad.
Companies are companies and nothing else (a cigar is sometimes simply a
cigar). There is no such thing like a company which is the empire of the
evil (not even microsoft) and there is no such thing like a company where in
the management the angels sing and keep the eternal flame of free and open
source software burning.
So the question or the claim “oracle = bad” is a bit - let’s say -
unrealistic. The entity “oracle” is neither bad nor good.
Their business policy can have good or bad consequences for some of us, that
is something different.

12

Larry doesn’t feel the need to be liked; he just wants to suck your blood. Come Halloween all the kids in Redwood City will be trick or treating in Larry Ellison costumes.

13

Hello All,

This is an interesting conversation. But honestly, Oracle does not interest me nearly as much as Novell.

I am still skeptical that OpenSUSE means anything other than Novell. I remember the last time Novell tried to aquire it’s way out of irrelevence. If Novell demonstrates the same pinache as it has in the past … SLED/SLES will go the way of Unixware … and OpenSUSE the way of OpenSolaris ???

Whether it be Oracle, Novell, Sun Microsystems, IBM, SuSE, or MySQL … these are all examples of for profit business entities that operate only for the sake of profit. All decisions will be made as a means to achieving profit. That’s business!

MySQL, and perhaps SuSE pre-Novell to a limited extent, are examples of OpenSource companies, companies that employ a model of selling software as software support services rather than Software as property. This new business model for selling software services came about as a by-product of the Free Software movement started by Richard Stallman. Free Software, through ingenious licensing, took a big bite out of the artificial property being created and sold by companies like Sun, AT&T, and Oracle. The success of the “Open Source” software development methodology, made possible by GPL and other licenses, proved to be cost benificial across a wide range of companies and industries.

Why write a web server from scratch when you can better serve your customers leveraging the work already completed by Apache? (hee hee … remember Netscape/iPlanet/SunONE/SunJavaWebStuffer/ThisWeeksNewName) Why pay IBM 10 gizillion dollars to use software that you will never be allowed to inspect without paying 10 gizillion more dollars to see how much you’ve paid to use spaghetti code hacked together by a bunch of college kids from Banglore. Why pay M$ anything to use a product that was NEVER designed or implemented properly, only to pay extra for the priviledge of speaking to a kid from Banglore, who will only be more baffled by your problem than you are and happily forward you to an endless que … you might get a refund for the “support” fee you just paid … but probably not.

A rant in respose to a rant … hmmmm!

Free Software is about freedom. Business is about profit. OpenSource companies sell software support services instead of software as property. Software as property seems to be on the decline. Software as knowledge seems to be on the rise. Oracle sells software as property. Sun never really sold software … and never figured out how to sell it as property, service, or anything else … :). Novell used to sell software as property. Back in the 1990’s, they aquired better property but did not know how to sell it. A few years back they aquired a new business model … and it’s very early in the game yet … and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1992, aided by some hackers and a few gnus, penguins learned to fly!

14

WOW! I was not aware of this until reading your post. I just read this article: Google dubs Oracle suit ‘attack on Java community’ • The Register

Seems to me Oracle is trying to put the Jeanie back in the bottle … as if there has ever really been a truely successfull anc completely proprietar programming language.

And on the Solaris front, I really appreciate the words of Steven Stallion quoted by Ars Technica:

This is a terrible sendoff for countless hours of work [building] quality software which will now ship as an Oracle product that we (the original authors) can no longer obtain on an unrestricted basis … I can only maintain that the software we worked on was for the betterment of all, not for any one company’s bottom line. This is truly a perversion of the open source spirit.

This is the double edged sword of corporate sponsored “free” … you are free to donate your labor to capital … :stuck_out_tongue:

15

On 2010-08-17 06:36, oxala wrote:
>
> Hello All,
>
> This is an interesting conversation. But honestly, Oracle does not
> interest me nearly as much as Novell.
>
> I am still skeptical that OpenSUSE means anything other than Novell. I
> remember the last time Novell tried to aquire it’s way out of
> irrelevence. If Novell demonstrates the same pinache as it has in the
> past … SLED/SLES will go the way of Unixware … and OpenSUSE the way
> of OpenSolaris ???

Oh, common! It was Novell who opened up SUSE.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” GM (Elessar))

16

Hello Carlos,

You are correct; point well made! I certainly can not complain about any specific decisions made thus far; if anything, I have been pleasantly surprised by Novell. My skeptism does not concern ‘open vs closed’, but rather to the ability to implement a successfull business model around the open source suse product. As an advocate of FOSS, it was nice to see Sun “open” as much stuff as they “opened”. But the core motivation of Sun, to find a successfull business model for thier software, never materialized. I’ll be the first to admit that I have some personal biases at play here … but the real questions are around the business viability of Open Source companies. I wish there were more examples of success, but realistically, FOSS is a very new game in many ways.

Have a great day!

17

SLED/S and RHEL are doing quite well right now. SuSE is Novell’s most profitable product.

18

One theory has it that Oracle has a completely different game plan. They aren’t interested in leveraging opensource to make money like Google, IBM, HP, Novell, or even Microsoft. They want to make money by killing it, by trashing products and filing lawsuits. Based on Oracle and Larry Ellison’s past history this might be a credible theory. They’ve attempted this type of scorched earth approach before. Are they nuts or just really scary, who knows. Larry Ellison may be a strategic genius although maybe not a likable one.

See Oracle aims to destroy open source software industry

19

Well let’s see…first it was lawsuits over Java, then ditching OpenSolaris
so you know what’s next…OpenOffice.

20

IBM should be worried, they use Java for several things and Lotus Symphony is based off OpenOffice
Although unlike Google, IBM has a ton of patents, so it’s less likely to happen.