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Comment by etherael | Hacker News Reader

Did Oracle buy Sun to strip it and liquidate the intellectual assets? What's their plan here? It seems like they have zero interest in building the products.

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Oracle is a consistently profitable company. They know how to run a business. They know what they're doing. If the old Sun and their culture wanted to survive, they needed to run a better business.

They certainly know how to sell their database. Whether this translates into an equal success with their Sun IP has to be shown. The good thing for them is that they acquired pretty mature products, so they can probably "coast" along and still make a reasonable profit. It's still open whether they can foster enough innovation to keep things going with Java, Solaris… Their track record isn't very good in that respect.

Of course, it all boils down to whether they need to innovate in the first place. By now, Java is well established enough in the enterprise sector, just as BEA and Oracle DB are.

ZFS, however, is not in that category, and everything I've heard says that it needs more work and a lot more polish.

You should try putting it through its paces before coming to that conclusion; I've heard different things from other people, and I currently use it for my media storage.

The problem is that for this type of thing credible reports of failure carry more weight than reports of success. If you're making a big bet on the reliability of file system you want to mitigate risk, and for all I know either you haven't tickled a bug I would or you've just been lucky so far.

When I looked hard at this 2-3 years ago, it was clear to me that without a tape backup system I couldn't justify purchasing, ZFS just wasn't there yet. I've heard nothing since them to convince me it has been sufficiently polished to get over my threshold or required reliability.

ADDED: I don't think it can be said that ZFS is established to the same degree that the parent's examples are (Java, BEA and Oracle's DB).

On the other hand, I think that file systems are closer to the heart of a database company than quite a lot of other Sun technologies (e.g. JavaFX). Oracle does sponsor btrfs – which is even more in its infancy.

Also, Jeff leaving doesn't necessarily mean that ZFS is dead to Oracle. Maybe he left because they decided to focus more on btrfs, maybe it's just a personal issue.

Indeed, 20 years at one company is a long time, plus his personal financial upside became strictly capped to salary once Sun was assimilated by Oracle. There's all sorts of reasons he might jump at a new opportunity, many of which don't mean the end of ZFS.

Of that I have no doubt, but what I originally thought they would do; use their business resources mixed with Sun's engineering resources, does not appear to be their plan at all. They seem to be losing all of the best Sun engineering talent and do not seem at all concerned about about that fact.

That leads me not to conclude they are failing at what I originally thought they were doing, but succeeding at something else and I am curious as to what that is.

They bought suns business. They will probably replace engineers and continue projects they like, they will lose engineers focused in products that are cut.

I think part of suns problem was engineering that was going in for engineering sake, not business sake, and oracle is going to lose those engineers.

I don't know what businesses other people have collaborated with ... but to me the people behind the products I'm using matter a lot, I'm not dealing with faceless entities.

Personally that's precisely why I'm using Postgresql ... I can talk to the core team of developers and get their input whenever I feel like there's a problem with Postgresql. And for a web service we worked on, we even hired a Mysql developer to come and help us (was also on Sun's payroll at the time).

How could I trust a product based on ZFS or how could I trust them to build my products on top of Java or any of their Sun-derived solutions ... when the top talent that worked on those products left?

Not to mention I don't like hypocrites ... before the Sun acquisition they called on Sun to make the JCP more open. Is this an US thing? Can companies fuck with you because it's just business?

Oracle seems to me like a sweat shop. Nothing wrong with that and I'm glad they are making lots of money ... but in my shop you can get fired for suggesting Oracle products, and it's not just me, there's a whole generation of software developers that won't touch their cash cows.

There's a whole generation of developer that have chosen Mysql or Postgres or implemented their own shit, and did not go for Oracle's DB ... that's revenue and opportunities lost for them, and I'm only seeing this trend getting stronger.

Sun had more copyrights than anyone except IBM. I suspect that's the reason. And it could have even been a defensive thing. Sun was obviously failing badly. If they didn't buy Sun someone else eventually would and then that company could almost certainly start suing oracle over something.

Simply profiting does not mean that you're playing the game optimally.

While small organizations can't afford a research division, Oracle certainly can. You'd think a company in the business of storing data might want to keep the guy who created ZFS, especially given how lively the database world is right now with NoSQL implementations, etc.

Based on what James Gosling has said, perhaps Oracle's general HR policies just aren't compatible with retaining people at Jeff Bonwick's level.

There could also be bureaucratic turf wars going on, i.e. the total loss of autonomy/decision making power that Gosling reported suggests that those already in Oracle are happy with how they run things and have no intention of sharing those responsibilities. One can also imagine Oracle having a culture where those acquired from a money losing company don't get much respect for that alone.

This happens everytime a company is taken over by a larger one. Except for a few VPs who are part of the M&A team - everyone at the smaller company always ends up beneath the same person at the larger one.

Everyone in tech knows this - which is why everyone who can leaves before a 'merger'. And why you never hear of the innovative smaller company's work 6months after the takeover.

I'm not sure that's entirely true (well, except for the reporting thing). Some companies have a reputation for acquiring smaller companies with the express purpose of keeping their staff, e.g. Cisco (at least in times past) and Google.

But, yes, most of the time this is an important part of what makes the vast majority of high tech acquisitions fail miserably.

Even G often seems to perform quite poorly. Viz Dodgeball / 4square. Thoroughly alienating Dennis Crowley seems like an enormous mistake. Or Paul Buchheit. Or the Delicious guy who worked at G but didn't find it a welcoming environment. If they were serious about social, they'd do whatever it takes to keep people like Joshua who've built successful social products.

I'm coming around to Zuckerberg's opinion that social is something a company is built around, not something you staple on or buy after the fact.

> Or the Delicious guy who worked at G

This comes across very weird...

I know... Wrong website for jokes like these. Couldn't help.

There's a Joel Spolsky podcast about Qt (pronounced cute) where he talks about the cute guy giving the talk - to the confused embarrassment of the other speakers.

They know how to run one kind of business, that much is clear.

The question was "what is their plan" not "is Oracle a competent company".

I suspect somebody said the same thing about GM or Chrysler

Oracle is technically irrelevant because they aren't technically focused. They aren't even close. Their core product hasn't been gaining any steam for years and they're riding out that gravy train. They have to keep purchasing other companies to remain relevant.

So from the thread below it sounds like Oracle actually acquired Sun primarily for their customer base alone, a large pool of cashed up blue chips for Oracle's sales force to feast on. The engineering culture and aptitude at Sun would from this strategy just be considered overhead, thus the mass exodus of talent. So perishes a once mighty titan.

Still, will be interesting to see what happens with the seeds flung off from this tempest.

Oracle bought Sun to make more money.

That's clearly the "why". He (and I, for that matter) want to know "how".

Because the alternative was that IBM or HP would buy Sun - or they would simply disappear.

The result (in either case) would be a lot of IBM hardware salesmen crawling over Sun's customers saying things like: If you want to switch to DB2 to go with your new IBM servers we can do you a deal.

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