A year later: Has Oracle ruined or saved Sun?

[Sabre]

Info World

In its first year in charge of the former Sun Microsystems technologies, Oracle stepped on plenty of toes, as the company dueled with both the open source community and Google. But Oracle also has released a plethora of products and advanced numerous projects derived from the Sun acquisition, ranging from Java and NetBeans IDE upgrades to StorageTek storage units, the Solaris OS, and Sparc hardware. Has Oracle ruined Sun or saved it?

Oracle formally took over Sun in late January 2010. Since then, the company has had to pursue a goal that had escaped Sun in the later years of Sun's existence: profitability. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison in September 2009 said Sun was losing $100 million a month while waiting for the $7.4 billion Sun acquisition to be completed. Ellison since then has criticized Sun management for bad business practices and noted Sun did not make a lot of money from Java, whereas Oracle did.

So it shoud be no surprise that Oracle in the past year has pursued whatever opportunities it can find to make money when Sun did not. This push for profits has forced Sun's engineering-driven culture to take a backseat to the bottom line. Oracle has not been shy about asserting its control over the myriad Sun technologies, even if that has meant upsetting the people who started them.

Indeed, if the formerly high-flying Sun had been profitable, the company likely would still be here today. Instead, signs of Sun's fall are visible in the defunct company's Silicon Valley home. Facebook, for example, is moving into a former Sun research park near the southern end of the San Francisco Bay that had been a jewel in Sun's crown.

Oracle has made some common-sense moves with Sun's technology, such as pairing Sun hardware with Oracle middleware in the Exalogic Elastic Cloud system. Oracle, however, has taken a public relations beating in the open source realm, where projects such as the Hudson continuous integration server and Java itself have been the subjects of controversy.

But a review of Oracle's moves during the past year reveals advances for former Sun product lines, soothing the concerns of IT pros who had committed to Sun's technology. (A notable exception has been the Sun Cloud, the cloud computing platform that never got off the ground after Oracle took charge.)

Oracle did not comment for this article, but even an official at the Apache Software Foundation, which has sparred with Oracle over Java licensing terms and control of the platform, gave Oracle a qualified nod. "By every measure, I think Oracle is a very successful technology business, so as to how Oracle as a business will do with Sun technology, I think they're going to do great," says Geir Magnusson, Apache's treasurer and co-founder of the disputed Apache Harmony project. "The problems have surfaced over the last 12 to 18 months have been sort of all around open source community."

More at article link

I have to admit, while I'm not happy with the way some of the Open Source stuff is being handled, they are trying to turn Sun around.

[complacent]

i was absolutely floored that they breathed new life into Sun's hardware. i fully expected sparc to go the way of the dodo. that was cool.

java, android, apache, solaris... that's a different story. i hate what they've done to/for/against them.

[Sabre]

i was absolutely floored that they breathed new life into Sun's hardware. i fully expected sparc to go the way of the dodo. that was cool.

java, android, apache, solaris... that's a different story. i hate what they've done to/for/against them.

I'm with ya on the hardware. I was VERY surprised that they kept it around. They have some amazing stuff though, so maybe with the right pricing/marketing, SPARC will make a comeback.

[Raven]

I'm with ya on the hardware. I was VERY surprised that they kept it around. They have some amazing stuff though, so maybe with the right pricing/marketing, SPARC will make a comeback.

The cheapest, absolute cheapest, SPARC system is $20K. Me thinks not. X86 blades are just so damn cheap.

[Sabre]

Sun: $15,959.00

Processor 1 x 8-Core 1.4 GHz UltraSPARC T2, 64 Threads
Memory 16 GB (8 x 2 GB DIMMs)
Mass Storage 292 GB (2 x 146 GB) 10000 rpm SAS Disks
Network & I/O Options 4 x 10/100/1000 Ethernet, 3 PCIe; One x8-Lane, Two x4-Lane or XAUI
Solaris 10

Dell: $6,237.00

PowerEdge R415
AMD Opteron™ 4122, 4C 2.2GHz, 3M L2/6M L3, 1333Mhz
AMD Opteron™ 4122, 4C 2.2GHz, 3M L2/6M L3, 1333Mhz
16GB Memory(8x2GB),1333MHz Single Ranked UDIM for 2 Procs
Windows Server 2008 R2, Standard Edition,x64, Includes 5 CALS

Sun:

Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 Server
SPARC64 VII+
Max Processors: 64, Cores: 256
Up to 4 TB RAM
Up to 64 x 300 GB 10000 rpm SAS Disks

Dell:

Oops

[Raven]

If you need one massive server, maybe. But a pile of clustered x86 is still a force to reckon with. That's how google operates.

[schvin]

this topic just upsets me.

oh well. hopefully openindiana will go well.

[complacent]

this topic just upsets me.

oh well. hopefully openindiana will go well.

word.

[Sabre]

Oracle's Android claims slashed by US patent authorities

Oracle's broad legal front against Google has been whittled back further, this time by the US patent and trademark authorities, according to Groklaw.

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has rejected 17 of 21 claims associated with one of the patents in Java that Oracle asserted Google had violated with Android. The patent in question is number 6192476, one of six Oracle says Google has stepped on.

Groklaw reports that the USPTO dismissed the claims after it was asked to reexamine patent number 6192476 in March. The 17 claims were rejected, with the USPTO citing prior art. Google has requested other claims be reexamined.

In May, the judge hearing the case told Oracle to slim down its number of claims against Google, from the original 132.

US District Judge William Alsup wrote at the time that Oracle must narrow its claims against Google to a "triable number."

"There are hundreds of prior art references in play for invalidity defenses. This is too much," Alsup said.

He also told Google to reduce its number of invalidity defenses, pointing to inconsistencies in Google's argument. "Many of Google's invalidity contentions are inconsistent and presented in the alternative: Google contends that many patent claims are not enabled but also contends that the same claims are enabled by the prior art," he wrote in May.

Oracle wants to proceed to trial regardless of any further reexamination of the claims.

<sarcasm> Maybe all those promises Sun made to Oracle about the java suits were not true and it was just to boost their stock prices so they could make more money off the deal.... naaaaa </sarcasm>

[complacent]

that would have been a very funny way to go out with a bang.

"we're done, we've gotta sell. what do we do?"

"screw the pants off of whoever buys us. let's sell to the worst company in the market, someone we really don't like."



(it sounded cooler in my head, sorry. brain-to-keyboard filter is a bit off today.)

[Raven]

Going out screwing Oracle is a hell of a last show.