Sun takeover latest – Oracle still painfully silent
In the months since it completed its takeover of Sun Microsystems, Oracle has remained painfully silent over its plans for much of Sun’s treasure trove of open source assets. In the meantime, there are an increasing number of companies stepping up to shepherd Oracle’s lost sheep…
In the months since it completed its takeover of Sun Microsystems, Oracle has remained painfully silent over its plans for much of Sun’s treasure trove of open source assets. In the meantime, there are an increasing number of companies stepping up to shepherd Oracle’s lost sheep.
The Sun takeover only won final EU approval when Oracle publicly committed to future enhancement of MySQL under the GPL licence. Indeed, a recent survey of its own community members by business intelligence software vendor Jaspersoft suggests that 75% of respondents felt that MySQL development would continue at the same pace or improve under Oracle. For Java, where it must be said Jaspersoft has a vested interest in painting everything as rosy, the survey’s figures were even better, with 80 percent of respondents believing the Java process will improve or stay the same (Note: Java has never been fully open source).
Regardless of how representative Jaspersoft’s survey really is, life for Sun’s open source poster children is certainly better than for the host of assets now apparently consigned to Oracle’s home for unwanted FOSS projects.
Oracle inherited a host of open source projects that in some way conflict with parts of Oracle’s massive, monolithic enterprise products. Having already chosen the OSS alternative, customers with these products are extremely unlikely to migrate to Oracle. However, Oracle, given the EU’s concerns of its intentions towards Sun’s OSS assets, cannot be seen to kill these projects off. The solution, it would appear, is to ship them off somewhere cold, dark and out of the way, and pretend they don’t exist.
Perhaps the loudest of these open source orphans has been OpenSolaris. Sun’s dreams of building an open source server operating system to rival Linux seem a distant memory. The project’s new, icy stepmother only seems interested in its favoured, proprietary twin. Oracle has just announced a new deal with Hewlett Packard and Dell to sell the closed Solaris 10 on their respective ProLiant and PowerEdge servers. OpenSolaris, meanwhile, has been cut off completely, with all its attempts at long distance communication ignored.
Recent discussions on the mailing list of the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB)
have been terse,to say the least:
“The OGB, in particular, was created ‘to manage and direct an OpenSolaris community in its efforts to improve upon and advocate in favor of OpenSolaris, so that the community may long endure,’” commented John Plocher, OGB board member and former Sun Employee, on the mailing list. “Since Oracle bought out Sun, we’ve seen their commitment to the above dry up almost completely. In the three months since this OGB took office, we have had no Oracle/OGB Liaison, no Oracle employees on the OGB, no Oracle website support for our new constitution, no community-driven distro and no real communication between Oracle and the OGB.
At a recent board meeting the OGB even threatened to disband itself, and rumours are rife from within the OpenSolaris community that there are plans to fork the project away from Oracle control under a new organisation.
OpenSolaris is far from alone in the orphanage. However, there are several organisations showing an interest in helping Oracle’s unwanted stepchildren. Since the takeover was completed, Sun’s former chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, has been involved in setting up ForgeRock, a company which provides a new home for a host of Oracle’s apparently unloved and unwanted open source projects.
“We established the company to become a full service ISV working within open
source communities on so called ‘triple A’ 
technologies – access management, authentication and authorization. Our starting point was the excellent open source software created by Sun in this space,” Phipps cautiously commented to Linux User. “ForgeRock has discovered a large number of customers asking for support, particularly around OpenSSO and OpenAM.”
Last month also saw the launch of Whamcloud. The company has raised $10 million of venture capital to provide support and development around the Lustre massively parallel file system. Lustre, a technology which Sun itself acquired when it bought Cluster File Systems in 2007, is used in around half of the top 500 high performance computing clusters globally.
One thing is sure, there are a lot of interesting open source developments arising out of Oracle’s takeover of Sun. And the thing about orphans is that many emerge from their troubled origins with exactly the kind of fighting spirit it takes to become the next Larry Ellison.
Subscribe to Linux User & Developer to save more than 30% and receive our exclusive money back guarantee – click here to find out more.
to find out about all the latest Linux news, reviews, previews, interviews, features and a whole more.
I like Rory’s points about the many possibilities to come from Oracle/Sun’s orphaned and potentially valuable open source projects. But, I wanted to respond to Rory’s remarks about the validity and representation of Jaspersoft’s survey of its community.
In April 2010, Jaspersoft offered a survey to its (then) 130,000 registered community members. The survey questions were primarily designed to gain data on this community’s interests in and future use of Java and MySQL. Of the 518 respondents, 74% identified themselves as “Developer / Software Engineer”. Based on other Jaspersoft surveys of its community, this respondent rate and percentage is consistent with the profile of its community.
When asked, “Under Oracle stewardship, will the Java Community Process most likely:”, 40% responded that it would improve, 40% responded it would stay the same (and 20% responded that it would get worse). Further, when asked, “Under Oracle stewardship, what will happen to your use of Java?”, 25% responded that it would increase, 70% responded that it would stay the same (and 5% responded that it would decrease).
The survey was anonymous and no promotional offer was made that might have biased respondents. In general, Jaspersoft believes its developer community is representative of the general Java developer community and that these results are both statistically significant and valid. The full white paper is available at Jaspersoft’s web site: http://www.jaspersoft.com/whitepaper-OSS-oracle-sun-survey
Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft
To all those Oracle fan boys who said “Don’t worry about Sun’s products, Oracle will love them” here’s a big I TOLD YOU SO! Oracle said whatever they needed to say to keep the EU overseers happy. Now they are slowly withdrawing their support to let many of these projects die a slow death.
Many of you may say that Oracle was not threatened by any project at Sun since none where in direct competition with Oracle products. I disagree.
OpenSolaris is a fantastic OS that was going places. That may not jeopardize Unbreakable Linux standings now… but in the future?
Also, while MySQL is nowhere near Oracle (the app) in regards to corporate purchases or even in functionality, it was gaining features and momentum at a fast rate. Oracle (the company) is not dumb, they see this. Their silence only furthers the speculation that they whole heartedly approve of these products just quietly going away.
When any entity is interested in a technology or an application base they stand behind it. They promote it. They foster its growth. Where has Oracle done this with OpenSolaris, MySQL, Java, etc…?
What does an entity do when it does not want to deal with a problem and just wants the problem to go away? SILENCE
Yes I also believe the ‘TOLD YOU SO’ is warranted… however there is an answer and from what this article says it is already coming into view.
We need an Open Source company or companies to Fork the projects and keep them alive. MySQL should be grown to a level of Oracle (the app not the company). Others should also grow to show their importance.
We have 2 wins in that scenario…
1. We retain vital open source technology which does not go away at the whim of 1 company!
2. We show that a large company such as Oracle will not easily just buy an emerging technology and quietly kill it because it threatens their flagship product.
The message that is sent if we allow these to go away now is that any company can simply buy the rights to kill their competition there for ensuring that we the end users are always locked into buying their non-FOSS product!