Oracle: the new "axis of evil" against Free software | Hacker News Reader

Oracle: the new "axis of evil" against Free software

blogs.adobe.com

54 pointsoscarferdin69 comments

It's the weirdest experience to see someone aggressively defend free software on the adobe.com website with Oracle as the target.

yeah really. i get the idea that mr mcallister isn't a regular user of flex/ flash builder.

Surprisingly, the flex SDK is open source: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/

And there is at least one open source IDE that uses it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashDevelop

Also, the main part of the Flash Player is open source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_%28JavaScript_engine%29

And if I understand it correctly, the only reason it's not is due to licensing and patent stuff that is out of the control of Adobe.

the "sdk" is open source, but flex builder isn't (and they managed to break stuff that worked fine in eclipse). and have fun trying to get the flex builder plugin to work on linux, or even get the sdk working completely on linux.

I tried to do some flex development on linux two years ago from the command-line & I finally gave up & switched to the IDE. I hate languages where serious development is only possible from within a specific IDE. The kind of stuff I was trying to do is now fairly easy with Canvas, so good riddance to Flex!

You can also try OpenLazslo

We actually looked into that but LZX seemed like too much of a hassle. Bad call?

Have fun trying to read long non-wrapping lines of code scrolling horizontally.

I mean, come ON! A plugin for freakin' word-wrap?!

Can you explain?

The Flex Builder IDE (I used 3, but I think it's propagated on to 4 as well) does not have word-wrap when editing code. There's nothing you can do in any settings dialog or menu option to be able to comfortably edit long lines of code without scrolling.

You need to install a plugin to enable this. Granted, this is a limitation of the underlying Eclipse on which it is built, but I was using Flex Builder, not Eclipse, so my beef stands.

Citations: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/451245, http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=E0D9F

Also the Flex APIs are extremely tightly bound to closed-source Flash APIs, so its really not an entity unto itself. To be fair though, it is "open" enough to allow for example IntelliJ to support Flex development in IDEA.

Really, try FlashDevelop. It works well in Wine, and there's a beta version of it that works with Mono.

The open source SDK/IDEs are so cumbersome that unless you value your time at zero, it's much easier to just bite the bullet and buy the commercial Flex Builder IDE.

Have you tried FlashDevelop?

Not recently, I tried it a few years ago and it didn't seem like it would work for me for some reason. If it's a viable alternative to the Adobe tools, that's great.

I looked outside just to check, hell didn't freeze over. Still, I'll be watching the evening news, just in case.

Pot calling the kettle black much?

For mega-corporations, "open" is just a marketing buzzword to beat their opponents with, so it isn't surprising that Adobe writes about "closed minds and open source".

For Google, open source is a neat technique to assert Android moral superiority over iOS (even though Google's core assets - search, ads - aren't open-source, and Android apps such as Google maps aren't open-source)

For Sun, it was a good stick to hit Microsoft with. Making software free and open-source was their way of competing with Microsoft and making money from their hardware business.

Adobe is now clearly in the anti-Apple/iPhone camp and needs to ingratiate itself with Android/Google. It looks like they're the latest company to discover the magic of the "open" buzzword. Sadly for them, I don't think it will be much effective

The problem is that the author does not cites the iPhone or Apple, and although he cites Android he hardly cites it in a positive way, he even provided two links that openly criticizes Android and it appears he is endorsing their positions.

Anyway, I agree with the big picture of your comment

>even though Google's core assets - search, ads - aren't open-source

Thats probably another example of cargo cult openness. I can't see how anyone is better served by opening google's client-server stuff.

It'd be nice if access were a little more open a least, on terms similar to the Bing Search API, though I can see why they don't do that.

Indeed. Adobe had showed the way with the Macromedia's acquisition: swallow your only other competitor and keep everything close.

In fact one can see _all_ the open source Adobe projects: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/site/Projects

How many of these were projects that they had and were subsequently open sourced? I count Tamarin, and possibly a few more which I hadn't heard of.

Why not open source Acrobat? Or Photoshop? Or Flash?

Edit: forgot to add that Oracle may have killed the OpenSolaris's corporate backing, but it seems intentioned to support quite a lot of Sun's open source projects. Plus isn't BTRFS coming from Oracle too?

Open sourcing their platforms like Acrobat and Flash would kind of make sense, but I have a hard time seeing any upside to opening up Photoshop. It's not like they can sell service and support for it, as there's an entire industry around training and books and advice. Maybe they could sell premium plug-ins, but there's already an industry around that, too.

Remarkably asinine coming from Adobe.

In any case, it would behoove those in the FOSS communities to not adopt incendiary language like this (except, perhaps, if you happen to be the target of litigation ;-). It instantly tarnishes any real argument/position, and accomplishes nothing.

Not that people won't jump up and down about Oracle childishly -- after years of people spelling 'Microsoft' with a dollar sign, one's expectations take a hit.

This reaction is uncalled for (especially the addition of the 'Axis of Evil' in this submission). I believe in open source as much as the next guy, but just a few weeks ago there was a thread on this board in which the vast majority of people considered OpenSolaris (with the exception of say, ZFS) had become a sub-par operating system, that they wouldn't want to use. There were a few users, yes, but I think it's glaringly obvious that the death of that project started long before the Oracle aquisition. I'm close friends with several former Sun employees, all of whom had been extremely unhappy in their positions with Sun for a few years. Sun was on the verge of complete financial failure.

Yes, Oracle may be being 'evil', but they know how to run a business and make a livelihood for their employees. How many of the people that are complaining actually paid for the real worth of all the Sun products they used? If people rely on Sun so much for their own businesses, how can they expect someone else to maintain it for them at a financial loss? These people have no right to complain about what Oracle is now doing to protect it's investment. Yes, you can make a living from open source. Was Sun doing a good job of that when Oracle got them? Absolutely not.

edit: I completely agree that all this was unexpected and is unpleasant, I just don't think it's fair to attack and blame Oracle.

If there is an anti-free-software Axis of Evil I would expect Adobe to be on either end of that axis or smack in the middle. I presume this is working up to them open sourcing all their code, including photoshop.

It is far easier to pander to the crowd than to act yourself :)

They haven't sued projects like Gimp yet, or have they?

That's a good point - this is a prime example of the differences between the GPL and more permissive FOSS licenses.

Actually it isn't. The Gimp is not exactly a fork of photoshop.

In some respect, yes the Solaris system has fallen behind the likes of Linux and *BSD. Particularly in the availability of third party libraries and applications. In other areas (such as the kernel) Solaris is much more stable, reliable, and advanced. I build a new kernel every week or so from illumos-gate, and must say that the technologies in the kernel (ZFS, DTrace, kmdb, smf, zones, predictive self healing, process rights management) and some shipped in user-land by default (mdb, libumem, pfiles, coreadm, event ports, pmap) are cutting edge.

In the end it boils down to using the right tool/OS for the job :)

"Employees need to get paid" doesn't justify bad behavior.

I think the only employee whose pay Larry Ellison is worried about is ... Larry Ellison.

but they know how to run a business and make a livelihood for their employees

I'll grant you that Oracle makes money and I'll gratuitously grant that the Oracle database is a nice product. But Oracle is certainly not in business to keep paying it's employees. It pays it's employees with the expectation that they will make it more money. And if that means firing software developers and hiring lawyers, I'm sure that's great for them. The livelihood of any remaining Java or Solaris developers at Oracle seems rather doubtful at the moment.

"does anyone high scale actually use oracle"

Oracle is so much more that its database products. Oracle Hyperion being a good example - it's the market leading financial consolidation/reporting system. It is very popular in large public companies.

I have a friend that is an Oracle DB Architect. One day he tells me he's left the bank and is working for some Swedish multinational. Tells me the name and I go "hmm, never heard of them". Website is a simple one page affair with contact information (in 50 countries) and nothing else.

I tell another friend about this company, he's a family investment planner (the guy that rich people give money to when they are too rich to work). He tells me in the hierarchy of multinationals, this one is at or near the top. You never hear about them because 99% of everything you buy is financed through them.

And that is Oracle's main clients. Really large companies with incredibly deep pockets and, most likely, a simple webpage that doesn't describe what they really do.

Think of it, most people never heard of AIG, until the government had to loan them $182 billion.

Erm... Well AIG did do ads on TV and whatnot.

So what is this mysterious all-encompassing company then?

I would guess someone like this: http://www.sek.se/

There are a number of (large, quiet) sites with ginormous Oracle databases.

Sites which often fill large rooms with multiple and well-populated versions of storage controllers similar to the HP XP2400 series to house all those Oracle databases:

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12711_div/1271...

Acceptance of (most) other database vendors and of other data access models tends to trail in the enterprise market; it's a very large and cautious and conservative market, and poles apart from a startup.

This makes me think Adobe is starting to sweat a little about their reliance on Java. It underlies a good portion of their tools.

Which tools?

Flash Builder, Flex, AIR, Cold Fusion and JRun are all Java based. If Oracle were to do with Java what Apple did with the iPhone and close off any third party tools Adobe could be in rough shape. It is hard to imagine that happening but Oracle does have some competing products like JavaFX and WebLogic that probably make it interesting.

ColdFusion is built on Java.

Lots of high-level functionality in their Creative Suite stuff is done in JavaScript. Photoshop and Illustrator in particular, also quite a lot of After Effects addons. Then there's a tool called ExtendScript which is a lightly customized JS implementation/toolchain for messaging and passing projects between their applications. That's the only coding I ever do nowadays, actually.

My guess is they're worried about getting hit with a legal brick too, since it would really mess up their roadmap. Maybe they'll develop a sudden enthusiasm for Python :-)

Java is to JavaScript what Car is to Carpet.

...and Monk to Monkey

What's that got to do with Java?

Technically, nothing. Legally, Oracle has patents relating to both. I should have said 'It's not just Java,but JavaScript too...'.

Java is not JavaScript. the two are entirely unrelated aside from the name.

Yes, my error. But the reason I mentioned JavaScript is that Oracle happens to own the trademark on it: http://www.trademarkia.com/javascript-75026640.html

As far as I know, Extendscript does not use any Sun IP (it was originally written by a Michael Daumling), but there are numerous Sun patents specifically related to JavaScript interpreters, accessing APIs via JavaScript, and so forth, mostly from 2000-2003. JavaScript as a language came from Netscape, but it's hard to say exactly where their IP ends and Sun/Oracle IP begins.

So there is a little more to my remark than just the verbal similarity.

That said, coldfusion is actually implemented via bastard hellish Java classes attached to a demon spawned plethora of angry revenants turning the rusty wheel of the terror inspiring demonic abortion that Adobe does indeed currently hold dominion over, those 12k p/a fealty bonds they get from their thralls does make them not quite as disinterested as you might think.

In a way I'm glad they dropped OpenSolaris. If they didn't, then OpenSolaris would still be a project with Oracle's deep claw in it. That claw carries infectious diseases. I look forward to the new effort; Illumos.org

I won't lie, I am in fact very much excited about it!

[Tinfoil hat on]

  * Oracle is suing enemies of best buddy Apple (Google/Android/Java)
  * Adobe is another sworn enemy of Apple
  * Adobe has products in Java EE (ColdFusion)

[/]

I did not realize, nor have I ever heard, that Oracle is best buddy with Apple? Why would that be so? I am not being sarcastic, just trying to broaden my knowledge on the subject.

Larry Ellison is friends with Steve Jobs and even threatened to buy Apple for Steve Jobs. Check news from the 1996-1997 era about Apple's buying of NeXT. I really don't think that is in play here.

Although, I really believe Adobe can shut it until they point to an open source Flash client that can be used with Hulu.

If I recall correctly, the iMac started out as ellison's idea.

Not the actual released iMac, but the rumor was that its form was from a project at Apple started as a network computer (Ellison's thing at the time).

http://www.macobserver.com/columns/1temporalloop/2007/05/15....

Notice I said "started out". :-)

Plus, what do you think the i stood for? And do you know of any other companies that put a superfluous i for internet in product names (or at least did at the time)?

Sorry, I was just adding the link /info and didn't word it particularly well. (I did upvote you original from the 0 - don't know why someone would downvote it).

It's more on personal (Jobs-Ellison) than company level.

Jobs was the "official photographer" at Ellison's wedding.

  Also in 1997, Ellison was made a director of Apple Computer after
  Steve Jobs came back to the company. Ellison resigned in 2002,
  saying that he did not have the time to attend necessary formal
  board meetings.

> No company is perfect. But these recent moves seem to indicate that the axis of evil has shifted south about 850 miles or so.

I looked on a map and 850 miles north of Redwood Shores leads me to believe he is a) admitting Adobe (Seattle) was the previous axis of evil or b) bestowing the title upon Canada.

Well, that's ten minutes of my life I'll never get back.

It's also possible they were referring to Microsoft, which also is about 850 miles north of Redwood Shores.

Edit: After looking at the quote in context, this is supported by a comment three paragraphs earlier, where the author says, "Oracle has managed to move into the role formerly played by Microsoft."

Good call :)

Ever since the purchase of Sun, this was always assumed to happen - they are too cutthroat to leave those projects alone.

Someone at Adobe is attacking Oracle? Pretty hilarious ...

I think ratifying all software as service will fix patent terrorism.

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