Who does the work is immaterial to a lot of people. When Oracle bought Sun, literally everyone knew they'd move to a paid commercial license eventually. Which they did. I personally am amused at this sequence of events. It happened to other Sun products as well; open office, and mysql primarily. Commercial licensing didn't work for those open source projects either. What did Oracle actually gain from the Sun acquisition? With this news it seems like nothing. No tears shed for Larry.
Just to specific answer the question of what did Oracle gain, I believe they made back all of their investment across their Exadata line of products which were sold to large commercial enterprises, running on custom SPARC silicon.
Yeah, this. Larry bought SUN to complete his vertically-integrated stack: "You want Enterprisey Business App X? We sell you the whole server! No more worrying about hardware requirements, just roll this box in your datacentre and configure away; we guarantee it will work great." That, and ensuring their beloved Java stack (on which they had bet the farm) would survive. Everything else (MySQL, OpenOffice, VirtualBox, etc etc) was just bonus.
The acquisition made a lot of sense. I was a lowly minion in Oracle when talks between SUN and IBM fell apart, and I told everyone I met "it would be great if we bought them"... After the acquisition, I expected MySQL to die a horrible death and actually it kinda survived (although barely), which I thought was somewhat magnanimous. I was hoping they would just offload some of the stuff that simply didn't make sense (Oracle selling word-processors and chat clients, really...?), but sadly some busybody repackaged them into embarrassing products. And for years they went "business as usual" for Java, actually re-igniting development in a suspiciously proactive manner, which was great... until the day the license changed.
You sure about that SPARC bit? According to [0] v1 ran on HP commodity hardware, and the subsequent history repeatedly mentions intel xeon processors...
"it depends". The v2 box we had back in ~2009 was Intel and Linux on the compute side but SPARC and Solaris for the storage side. It had horrible throughput though for the 1st year or so that we owned it, but it eventually got better after some software upgrades. All the equipment was Sun branded though (except for the Infiniband switches, I think those were Mellanox, but it's been more than a decade so don't quote me)
Maybe they should've given out TCK licenses then? You know, the thing that exists to prevent fragmentation of Java except you're not actually allowed to use it?
TCK is free for OpenJDK forks, and I believe IBM has more than enough money to pay for it.
Also, java is one of the few languages with complete specifications, instead of saying that here is the reference implementation, what it does is the spec.
> TCK is free for OpenJDK forks, and I believe IBM has more than enough money to pay for it.
But it's not available at any price for independent implementations like Dalvik (I'm sure if it were merely a matter of money Google would've paid up). Most people who built the Java ecosystem were bait-and-switched: we were told the language would be free and the trademarks etc. were just to stop incompatible implementations, but that turned out to be false.
> Also, java is one of the few languages with complete specifications, instead of saying that here is the reference implementation, what it does is the spec.
Allegedly. Given that there are no independent published implementations (various organisations claim to have independent implementations but none of them are readily available), we should be sceptical in practice.
There aren't. There are OpenJDK forks and there are some mythical JVMs that pjmlp and like two other people have supposedly used but aren't actually available even if you are a billion-dollar hedge fund offering to pay the price that they're allegedly for sale at.
To be slightly less snarky there are also some pre-Oracle ones like JRockit; back in the Sun days the TCK licenses do seem to have actually been available.
You have an history defending Google's actions to screw the Java community in name of Android Java, so that is a natural thought.
And no, not an Oracle employee, but actually employed by one of the Java main contributors, quite easy to find out which one, although I speak in name of the Java community unable to write proper Java on Android, while ISO C and ISO C++ are fully supported.
Yes, and since code is copyrightable, and API is code, the default is that APIs are copyrightable. What was decided that this reuse by Google was fair use (which might give precedent to similar issues, but in itself doesn’t mean that APIs would not be copyrightable)
It’s more like nobody wants to do business with Oracle. The products themselves are fine. It’s the pray-we-don’t-alter-it-further licensing that’s a dealbreaker.
I beg to differ. The majority of their products are flawed and outdated. I'm not talking Oracle DB or Java but the vast amount of other apps they sell.
They bought lots of stuff, pull funding from development and redirect it to sales. Then they sell it to fit their vision; but nothing integrates cleanly and you'll be spending massive amounts of money on consultants who understand product A & B and how to connect them.
A java-dev can't do that; you need that A and B knowledge + integration skills. Those consultants are very hard to find and good effective ones nearly non-existent. The fees are enormous regardless of whether you use Oracle consultants, Oracle partners or freelancers. If you do manage to find cheaper consultants (offshoring most likely) be prepared for terrible quality as well.
Ow, and once you're finally comfortable with their stuff after spending all that money, be sure to make a reservation for the unexpected additional license fees they'll slap on you because you failed to remember the fine print.
> They bought lots of stuff, pull funding from development and redirect it to sales. Then they sell it to fit their vision; but nothing integrates cleanly and you'll be spending massive amounts of money on consultants who understand product A & B and how to connect them.
I had the "pleasure" of working with Oracle BPMS 10 at one point. It was a piece of crap they'd acquired (but apparently a better piece of crap that the other ones available at the time that the team had evaluated). It has pretty much zero code reuse features, and the consultants had taught the team to do stuff like cram all kinds of barely-related stuff into one "screen" so parts could be "reused." Getting support for all the bugs in 10 was extremely painful. It seemed like there was one guy who know what he was doing, and the rest just repeatedly asked for more logs. BPMS 11 was a rewrite with no migration path offered (but by the time that came around I'd noped out of that team).
The team eventually re-implemented everything in Activiti before support for BPMS 10 ended. BPMS 12 might have had a migration path (IIRC, a crappy one), but by then Oracle had burned their bridges.
