Hacker News Reader

Comment by pimlottc | Hacker News Reader

Context? Why is this significant?

Virtualbox has been controlled by Oracle since that company's acquisition of the former Sun Microsystems in 2010.

Oracle has a remarkably chequered past regarding its hosting of Free Software projects: OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, Mysql, and AFAIR several Apache projects, off the top of my head.

Virtualbox itself has been somewhat closed down / restricted over the course of Oracle's tenure.

This could well be an early indication of further such moves on Oracle's part. That's very decidedly not clear at the moment, but would well bear further observation.

Your conspiracy theory sensor is set a bit too sensitively. :) This isn't Oracle acting malicious. It's a mistake.

Having experienced oracle's actions over the past few decades, there is no line between conspiracy and reality.

It's not a conspiracy and they're probably right to be a little paranoid.

Oracle buried OpenOffice and Hudson just out of spite. Especially for Hudson I was watching it happen almost day by day when it occurred.

What spite you mean?

I seem to recall trademark troubles with Oracle, which led to everyone forking and starting Jenkins.

But I don't think I've heard of Oracle intentionally burying a product.

> I seem to recall trademark troubles with Oracle, which led to everyone forking and starting Jenkins.

Well, you have a keyword in there, "everyone". All but 1 major contributor (not even the main contributor and definitely not the project architect and lead) disagreed with their decision.

Oracle persisted with the help of that major contributor - an Oracle employee, BTW - and while Jenkins was being created, they did not want to contribute and instead tried to create a competing effort over at the Eclipse Foundation.

Jenkins was receiving 95% of the contributions because, as you said, "everyone" was helping out, while Hudson was slowly dying on the vine at the Eclipse Foundation, and Oracle was putting out cheerful release announcements for it <<for years>> even though anyone who checked the commit logs could clearly see that Hudson was dying.

Oracle kept pushing with Hudson internally for quite a few years but even they gave up and buried Hudson a while ago.

Similar story with OpenOffice. They <<really, really>> wanted control so they forced everyone else to force through their actions and OpenOffice basically had the same face, Apache Foundation, death. Though OpenOffice is more of a zombie these days, I don't think it's been shut down completely like Hudson.

MySQL has entered the chat

The shame!!!

I checked now and Hudson seems to be completely gone: https://git.eclipse.org/c/hudson/

The Eclipse Foundation has taken down even the Git repo, let alone the website.

DamageControl, the original inspiration for Hudson/Jenkins still has a repo on GitHub: https://github.com/codehaus/damagecontrol

So a super small toy CI server from 18+ years ago still has its source available yet Hudson, while the OG big CI server is completely gone from the internet, including Oracle's modifications.

Kind of shameful from the Eclipse Foundation, especially after the initial boasting: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Eclipse-Foundation-an...

It looks like it was taken down in June 2021 after years of nothing happening and nobody really noticed.

Still shameful that they didn't just put a copy on Github. 5 minutes of "work" and we could have kept a bit of internet history around.

True, but since it's git, anybody can just take their local checkout and push it to github.

If anyone still has it...

You've got it completely backwards with regard to OpenOffice. LibreOffice was prematurely forked from it for the sole reason that "Oracle owns it now"; what played out was that Oracle managed to relicense the entire suite to be under a single license (the Apache 2 license) while LibreOffice, to this day, continues with the triple-licensed mess that Sun had implemented. LibreOffice got popular, OpenOffice died off; Oracle handed it over to the Apache Software Foundation for it to die.

1. Why does it matter LibreOffice is triple-licensed, though?

2. Why do you think LibreOffice became popular? Hint: most of its contributors moved over from OpenOffice because few people trusted Oracle. Trust matters.

When it comes to Oracle, no sensor can be set to "too sensitive".

I was addressing the question of why the issue itself might gain attention on HN, and be worthy of deeper investigation, particularly in light of a rather snarky "slow news day" sibling response to the OP.

Oracle deserves a very close watch, and I've strong suspicions that overreliance on Virtualbox will end in tears.

It's not a belief that the cause is malice, it's a suspicion that it could be, or might portend same.

Just an FYI it's "checkered", as in a checker board.

Chequered would be for cheques, as in pay cheque.

<https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/chequ...>

<https://sapling.ai/usage/checkered-vs-chequered>

Ah an old world vs new world linguistic issue.

Failure accepted.

> Virtualbox itself has been somewhat closed down / restricted over the course of Oracle's tenure.

How so? VirtualBox was GPL-licensed before the acquisition and it remains so today. The extensions pack was always under a proprietary license.

> The extensions pack was always under a proprietary license.

Yes, while I'm not sure if the actual terms of the license changed, enforcement changed very much.

With SUN ist was "Of course, you can personally install it on your work computer and use it for work. Only if you deploy it to your fleet of computers please pay us."

https://web.archive.org/web/20100204053823/https://www.virtu...

Maybe that approach to licensing is why Sun ran out of money and had to sell itself?

I doubt VirtualBox was even a line item on Sun's financials, so I really doubt that had anything to do with their failure.

What I meant is, a lackadaisical approach to billing and asking for money was common at Sun for everything software related, same thing for Java which was definitely a line item.

Hardware was Sun's revenue model.

Cost of revenue for penny-ante fluff would have been orders of magnitude greater than actual revenue. Goodwill and other benefits substantively greater.

Blaming Sun's demise on Virtualbox largess is ludicrous on its face.

Sun has its lunch eaten by Linux and commodity hardware. Selling proprietary UNIX and super expensive hardware was a great business until Linux and (comparatively) cheap Intel boxes were good enough for more and more customers.

For example they removed PCI pass-through, they never updated their GPU guest drivers to support modern OpenGL, they never improved their (experimental) support for Mac OS X guests, in general the development of VirtualBox has been pretty much been completely halted over the last decade, in comparison to VMWare they practically went backwards.

> in comparison to VMWare they practically went backwards.

Well that's interesting. I recently went from free virtualbox to a paid vmware workstation license because of some frustrations with vbox, and found that vmware is not better or worse but just frustrating in different ways (e.g. clipboard sync doesn't have a directional option and shared folders are harder to set up, but usb passthrough is much more stable). Performance is identical for various workloads as near as I can tell, except that vmware's VM displays freeze for 0.5 seconds every time you focus/unfocus one (virtualbox is seamless). If vmware went forwards compared to that, one would have to have been crazy to pay if you can just apt install virtualbox

Slow news day?

I'm all for more slow news days.

They are all slow news days now. I have not been on Reddit for a good two weeks, I still hate it more than I miss it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com