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Comment by drostie | Hacker News Reader

Given the environment, you probably already know that there's a great talk called 'Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos' at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc .

The reason why it's relevant here is that this is not the first time that Oracle has closed-sourced an open-source project bought up from Sun. Oracle seems almost paraconsistent towards open-source in a very interesting way: they seem to view the GPL as a good way to get other companies to help them out without cheating (e.g. OpenJDK), but if they're going to do most of the development in-house anyway it seems they're much more willing to close the source (OpenSolaris, now apparently MySQL).

Could anyone comment on whether there's a larger pattern that I'm missing there? And are there other open-source technologies which were obtained from the Sun buyout which are also in danger which we should know about?

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Sun Grid Engine used to be open source, but now Oracle Grid Engine isn't. But what's far worse, in my opinion as a user, is that Oracle made many of the existing documentation and community support resources hosted by Sun disappear.

Oracle make a huge chunk of money from support contracts. I don't have any figures to hand, but when I used to work heavily with Oracle, the support contracts far exceeded the licence costs. And then they have the epic certification fees, on-site consultants and developers, and so on.

So as much as it pains me to say this, I can totally understand why Oracle have removed those resources because it's flies in the face of their business practices:

1. build something massively complex and counter intuitive to developer for and administrate

2. employ the best salesmen to encourage potential customers that your product is the most powerful and flexible tool out there

3. then charge your confused customers ridiculous support fees because they can't manage the solutions they've just bought

This is why my heart sank when Oracle bought Sun. The two businesses couldn't have a more different software culture (Sun Enterprises were, in my opinion, were one of the best for releasing open, well documented and well designed software)

If it makes you feel any better, most of the big companies I work with are moving full-stop from Solaris on SPARC to Linux on x86-64.

People who make the purchasing decisions are finally fed up with Oracle's incompetence and utter contempt for the rest of the industry. It's a shame, but I won't really miss Sun when they're finally, mercifully put to death. I hate Oracle for what they did to that company and I wish nothing but ill toward them.

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This is near universal in all of the financial world except for some legacy systems

The problem with wishing the company death is that we know what it will do in the final times. It'll become another SCO generally making life inconvenient for everyone for many years before we finally see the back of it.

We've already seen elements of this trait with their case against Google regarding Dalvik.

What do you suggest? They are making life inconvenient for everyone now and will continue to do so. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and put up with a one time pain and get it over with.

Ideal world (i.e. never going to happen): let evil people keep buying their stuff and getting screwed by them, but keep the rest of us out of it!

Didn't the financial crisis teach you that we can't be kept out of it?

because these sorts of resources are worth money, especially if instead of self-help, you had to pay a "professional services company" to help you.

By removing it, Oracle can lay claim to more professional services clients.

Or, it could just be incompentance on their end in maintaining the server...

Interestingly enough, the response seems to be people moving towards Slurm [1], at least for newly deployed systems.

Anyone know of other open-source resource managers out there?

[1] https://computing.llnl.gov/linux/slurm/

There are several I can think of: Open Grid Scheduler, TORQUE, Condor (ugh), and Slurm.

Open source that I know of:

OpenSolaris - OpenIndiana

OpenOffice - LibreOffice

Ksplice - Discontinued support for non Oracle linux

MySql - MariaDB

Ksplice still supports many flavors Linux and, if you use desktop Ubuntu or Fedora, you are welcome to use it for free. What you can't do is purchase new licenses for non-Oracle Linux if you aren't a grandfathered customer.

Disclaimer/Source: I work on the Ksplice team.

So, it's not really working anymore on non-Oracle Linux.

As cool as Ksplice is (and as stupid as Red Hat were not buying it), I don't know anybody that will use it now that Oracle bought it.

Hudson CI - Jenkins CI

There is DTrace software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTrace) whose documentation also disappeared. My friend pointed out while exploring DTrace to profile ruby apps.

VirtualBox...

Hopefully DotCloud isn't following the same pattern

The pattern you are missing is that Oracle, formerly Sun, paid Monty a billion dollars for MySQL, which he happily accepted. And let's not forget that MySQL was ALWAYS dual-licensed.

Sun didn't become Oracle, Oracle purchased Sun, so it wasn't Oracle who paid Monty. When Monty sold MySQL to Sun he believed them to be a good fit for the project, and they would keep it going in the spirit he hoped for. He could never have foreseen it would be sold to Oracle.

And yes, it has always been dual-licensed, but as Monty himself says: "The basic idea for our dual-licensing was this: if you bought a license then we waived the GPL restriction that you have to redistribute your code as GPL. You could change, modify, extend, distribute, and redistribute the copy in any way you wanted (but of course not change the license of the MySQL code). The license was for any version and usage of MySQL, for now and forever." [1]

[1] http://monty-says.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/thoughts-about-dual...

The writing was on the wall for Sun at the time. Maybe Monty couldn't have predicted it would be Oracle specifically, but he should certainly have seen that the continuity of Sun's operation could not be relied upon.

You should really consider that at no time would Monty himself have received a wire transfer for a billion dollars. This "Monty got a billion dollars, what more does he want?!" thing is repeated all the time, but it's just not true. The MySQL companies were bought by Sun for a billion dollars, but Monty did not own 100% of the companies (or even close) -- MySQL was substantially owned by a bunch of VC companies and other executives, all of which got the lion's share of the money.

Since tax records in Finland are public, you can see how much Monty made from this acquisition (approximately) here:

http://www.iltasanomat.fi/kotimaa/art-1288338449921.html

(Ulf Michael Widenius income for 2008, ~16.8M EUR)

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