THESE ARE MY COMMENTS AND OPINIONS:
“This does not represent the opinion of Adobe. Oracle is a valued partner and these opinions do not reflect Adobe’s position on Oracle’s business strategy.”
It’s fascinating watching the slow motion train wreck that is occurring between Oracle and the former open source culture of Sun.
Today, it seems that the OpenSolaris Governing Board has resigned en mass, due to the level of inactivity and commitment from Oracle.
<excerpt>
“I’m very sad to report that, as expected, it proved necessary for the OpenSolaris Governing Board to collectively resign today.”
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During the LinuxCon 2010 Boston, Oracle failed to mention OpenSolaris as part of the keynote. Questions on that topic were quickly diverted. Now we begin to understand why.
Combine this with the sudden patent lawsuit on Java against Google Android (who may have their own unique spin on “being open“) (see also this great post by Miguel de Icaza) and suddenly Oracle has managed to move into the role formerly played by Microsoft. And I didn’t even know that they were understudying it.
Oracle has smart people. They understand open source and its drive to developers. And yet, suddenly, it seems that Oracle is viewing “Open Source” as a new cash cow.
I have no problem making money from open source code. I have no problem with others doing so. I do have problems with removing community involvement once it has shown that it can create, drive and maintain such efforts. I do wonder who’s next in the shift from open source commitment that Oracle seems to be leading.
AGAIN:
THESE ARE MY COMMENTS AND OPINIONS:
“This does not represent the opinion of Adobe. Oracle is a valued partner and these opinions do not reflect Adobe’s position on Oracle’s business strategy.”
Is it just me, but is it impossible to consider Oracle as innovators in anything like the same vein as Sun et al.
When I think Oracle, I just get an image of stuffed suits in my head. They might be high performance in a single field, sure, but a conservative field. And rapidly losing ground to the competition in that – google, facebook, twitter – does anyone high scale actually use oracle?
Sure, they’ve bought & adopted a lot of great technology – from OS, Virtualisation, language, etc. But at the end of the day, it’s all just to prop up their one successful original product.
And buying stuff in is a world away from being able to create, or maintain it.
They’ve got a lot of work to do to convince us that they can deliver with the magnificent portfolio they’ve pulled out of the skip. They’re not starting well.
Wow. Because of a different early access plan Oracle is evil? CDDL lives on, InnoDB lives on, MySQL lives on. I suspect Oracle contributes more to the FOSS community (both pre Sun acquisition and since) than does Adobe.
Adobe attempts to do its share of open source work. We release core technologies. We support efforts like Eclipse, Linux Foundation, SQlite, and others.
No its not perfect, but then we haven’t sued anyone using our open source code.
Oracle also didn’t sue anyone using their open source code. Dalvik has no Java code. If it had, it would have to be GPL, and it would be protected.
Also, you say that De Icaza made “great post”. It is pure FUD, much like your post. De Icaza is Microsoft advocate, nothing more.
Oracle is not doing right things right now, (or maybe they do, who needs fauxpen source SoLarry’s when we have Linux, and who needs DRMed Android with forked kernel and Java ripoff when we have MeeGo without DRM and with real Linux kernel and real OpenJDK) but they do more for open source than Adobe does. They have all their software ported to Linux, they have open source contributions, you have nothing. You only have lame Flash port which is increasing my blood pressure every day. I never got why you keep that shit propriatary. Everybody hates it, if you open source it, we might fix it so it doesn’t suck that much. But you play Gollum. And you even have the nerve to preach somebody else about open source? Shame on you.
But you took down a SourceForge project for implementing one of your supposedly “open” specifications (RTMP):
http://linuxcentre.net/rtmpdump-can-be-used-to-download-copyrighted-works-like-a-web-browser
yet
How does Adobe support Eclipse, LF, SQLite and others? Can’t find a single committer on any of them.
well, we do the port of Eclipse to Macintosh. We are one of the top translators for babel.eclipse and made full translations for UI in 3.4 .
We were part of the effort to more Iaccessible2 to the BSD license, and were part of the recent announcements on open compliance from Linux Foundation.
We are one of the 5 members of SQLite Consortium, supporting the development and extension of SQLite.
Make flash Open Source and become a true leader.
At least Oracle sponsoring the development of btrfs, which is Very Good.
Agreed. It was one of the most popular presentations at LinuxxCon as well.
ok … so they canned opensolaris and are releasing Solaris Express … for FREE…. mainly because from what i read they saw opensolaris as a bit of a mess
Everyone pisses and moans.
They sue Google because google completely ignored all the previous concerns over java fragmentation that Sun raised. Even Gosling views Googles android as a problem for Java.
And somehow this is an attack on OpenSource??
Is it an attack on open source or on open communities? I think that the fact that Oracle is manipulating the community is a bad thing. Note that this is a personal opinion.
And regarding Google, if you review the links you will find both pro and con versions of information. I personally (again) find 100% compliance patent releases to be time bombs…
What communities are they manipulating? OpenSolaris never had a community in the first place, that is why Oracle can kill it! Sun failed at building a community because of fauxpen licensing (CDDL) and because they were to bossy. If it had community, Oracle wouldn’t matter.
Dalvik also don’t have community, it is entirely written by Google employees and class libarary is lifted from Harmony, which is again written by IBM in purpose to undercut Sun’s JAVA. No communities.
Oracle didn’t dare to attack real Java (openJDK) even though their tough competitor (Red Hat) use it to steal their WebLogic customers and migrate them to JBoss. Why? Because there is communiy around JBoss and OpenJDK. There is community because those don’t use fauxpen licenses and are open collaborative efforts. They use licenses who protect from SCOing, so Oracle can’t win.
Neither – its a company focusing resources on viable projects and cancelling projects which arent contributing to its portfolio
Casting it as a defiant attack on a particular mode of business is imposing your own prejudices on it. Oracle seems to be heavily involved in many areas of open source – cherry picking a few events and building a conspiracy out if it is irresponsible.
Sad sad thing for OpenSolaris.
OpenSolaris dead, so what?
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There have been several previews of the Solaris 11 source code, released as binary distros with source code from Sun/Oracle:
1) Solaris Express Community Editiion – SXCE. Released every other week.
2) Solaris Express Developer Editiion – SXDE. Dies in a couple of years.
3) SXCE dies in favour of OpenSolaris
4) OpenSolaris dies and Solaris 11 Express will be released at the end of 2010.
And then we have all the other community distros based on Solaris 11 source code: Schillix, Nexenta, Milax, Korona, etc etc etc etc.
I dont really see the problem that another Solaris 11 distro is killed, and a new one released? I would see a problem if Oracle killed Solaris 11, but no. Basically it is just Oracle rebranding from OpenSolaris to Solaris 11 Express. What is the problem?
Sun had 35.000 customers. Oracle has 350.000 customers. Larry Ellison will try to make them switch to Solaris 11 with new killer features in the combo OracleDB + Solaris 11. Maybe based on DTrace? Solaris 11 will play very well and tight with OracleDB. Oracle has ~ 75% of the database market: OracleDB + MySQL. IBM DB2 has ~15%. Oracle is no 1 in the database market, they will really try to make customers to switch.
Larry will also see that there will be business reasons to switch. Earlier there were only technical reasons. The Solaris future is much brighter than under Sun.
>The Solaris future is much brighter than under Sun.
By “brighter” you mean as it goes out in flames . RIP Solaris.
No. I dont mean like that.
Solaris had fewer and fewer paying customers, at the collapse Sun had 35.000 customers. The trend was negative. Sure, Solaris has shipped ~20 million licenses today (far more than IBM AIX and HP-UX combined) but the trend was negative regarding paying customers. OpenSolaris and all community based distros: Nexenta, Schillix, Milax, Korona, etc was increasing drastically but they dont pay. There was only technical reasons to switch to Solaris.
But Oracle has 350.000 paying Enterprise customers paying big money. A support contract for Solaris is nothing for them. Larry will make sure there are business reasons to switch to Solaris, and technical reasons with new Solaris 11. If Oracle can make a tiny percentage of their huge customer base to switch, then Solaris has succeeded big time. Solaris will be the only high end Unix that is increasing market share, when everyone else is decreasing. IBM does not own SAP, the SAP customers have no reasons to switch to AIX. But Oracle owns Oracle Database and MySQL. There will be strong reasons to switch to Solaris 11.
And, dont forget that Solaris 10 never was open under Sun. It was closed. But, Oracle is opening up Solaris 11. Solaris will be more open under Oracle, than under Sun. The BIG PROBLEM WITH ORACLE IS: they are renaming OpenSolaris to Solaris 11 Express. Apparantely that is a huge problem to some people. I couldnt care less.
> . But, Oracle is opening up Solaris 11.
If you regard the Apple/Darwin model (write it in secret and toss the source over the wall eventually) as “open” then you are right. You’re the only one that thinks it though. Oracle doesn’t have an open bone in its body.
>The Solaris future is much brighter than under Sun.
By “brighter” you mean as it goes out in flames
. RIP Solaris.
Ok Adobe, be an example and make the source of FreeHand free!
>Larry Ellison will try to make them switch to Solaris 11 with new killer >features in the combo OracleDB + Solaris 11.
There’s nothing interesting coming with Solaris 11. They will just extend its limitations to try to compete with the current Linux systems. It seems Oracle just wants to keep ex-SUN customers who bought long term support when SUN was still alive. They fear SUN customers will migrate to RHEL6 which will be a real revolution compared to RHEL5 in every aspect – switch from the very old Linux kernel to much newer one, SystemTap with DTrace features, powerful virtualization technologies, it will scale on systems which aren’t available on the market yet. There’s even much more coming with RHEL6.
I would like everyone to pay close attention to Illumos, which is the new OpenSolaris fork. Many ex-Sun/Oracle people are involved, and the whole effort is led by Garrett D’Amore (Solaris kernel developer).
Check out http://www.illumos.org
I am also hanging out on #illumos on Freenode, and it seems like an active community already. I really believe in Illumos being the future for OpenSolaris fans out there. RIP OpenSolaris, welcome Illumos!
PS: Illumos is still in beta phase, and is not a distro per se (although it may become one). For now, think of it as the building blocks needed to build distros.
Oracle bought Sun for several B of $. Who in their right minds would spend that amount of money and not think of ways to get it back + profit?
Sun have done
- OpenJDK (OpenSource Java)
- OpenSolaris (OpenSource Solaris)
- OpenOffice.org (OpenSource StarOffice)
- VirtualBox
and a lot of more as OpenSource.
Oracle still pay for OpenJDK-, OpenOffice.org- and VirtualBox-developer.
I don’t l like Oracle. And it is possible, that they will kill OpenJDK and OpenOffice.org like they have done with OpenSolaris. But currently they have not.
Before OpenJDK exists, there eixtsing “only” the specifications of Java for free. Suns own reference implementation was closed source.
The old Java-situation is stil existing for the Flash player: The specification is out, but the own regference implementation of the Flash player is closed source. And we can happy about that. Because in times of Macromedia, there don’t exists any Flash-player specification.
But why don*’t make Adobe its player OpenSource. Or publish at least the own code of the Flash player as OpenSource (if there existing third party code) ?
That would be like Sun have done with OpenJDK. OpenJDK is “only” 95% of the code of the closed source Java. The last 5% are mostly written by Kodak and is closed source. They will be rewritten by Sun (now Oracle) and the OpenSource Community like the IcedTea-project (http://icedtea.classpath.org)
But Adobe have nearly nothing created as OpenSource of its Flash player. “Only” the ActionScript 3 Jitter (Tamarin).
How can Adobe talk about OpenSource, when their own cost-free products are not OpenSource?
I think that is the very much importants step Adbobe have to done: Making the Flash player to OpenSource.
(The second impoartant step would be to have the CreativeSuite-products for Linux and the third important step would be to have Light versions with limitit functionality of the CreativeSuite for hobbyists, which is not so cost extensive like the existing professional version).
But as I said: The most important thing, is to have a OpenSource Flash Player.