Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Wow. Interesting, but my gut reaction is "yuck".

In addition to the mysql question, I wonder what it will mean for other open source stuff, like Java, which has been moving in that direction, Open Office, Solaris, etc... Oracle, traditionally, hasn't been a big open sourcer of things, although they were one of the first to give some real legitimacy to Linux by porting to it, some 10+ years ago.

Also, culturally, how will the fit be? Wonder if they intend to keep some of the good bits of Sun and trash the rest or try and run it as a going concern?

Big news in any case.

View on HN

"I wonder what it will mean for other open source stuff"

Looks like it's time for the open source model to prove its stripes. One of the main selling points for using software with an open source license is that you can get someone else to service/extend it for you even if the originator of the code goes out of business or shuts down development.

It will not be surprising if Oracle wants to take some of the Sun open technologies in a more proprietary direction or just show less interest in continuing development. That will mean we will see whether or not the purported benefits of an open source license prove themselves or not.

The main challenge will be forking, assuming Oracle continues to develop MySQL, for example, but only in ways that do not encroach further on Oracle's existing DB market. If people want features that Oracle does not want to provide, it looks like forking will be the only option.

> Looks like it's time for the open source model to prove its stripes.

Errr... it already has, over the last 10 to 20 years. That doesn't mean that projects don't go through ups and downs though, and Sun has, as of late, been contributing to stuff like JRuby. It won't die if they pull the plug on the paid developers, but it might be a setback for the project.

It's probably true that projects like JRuby/Jython/Scala/etc won't die (especially Jython what with BEA and all); I'm more concerned about things like invokedynamic and friends from JSR-292.

Hopefully Oracle will be friendly to Sun's research-like teams that may not be making direct contributions to the bottom line.

Hopefully they'll throw away less than IBM would have. But the culture clash may be "interesting" to watch.

This may not be a good thing for open source, unless Oracle want to do things a bit differently. Or treat Sun as an independent unit.

I suspect that there has been an ongoing culture clash within Oracle. Perhaps refugees from within Oracle will gravitate towards Sun's camp?

You make it sound like there's going to be war within Oracle!

Have you ever been in a company during a merger? (I'm on #3 now.) There's always the potential for that. Internal power fights are common in times like that.

Legend has it, all they did to port oracle to linux was type 'make' -- no source changes whatsoever.

Of course, this is Oracle, so that's most likely marketing...

Oracle is written in two layers, there is an abstraction layer and Oracle itself. If you know Oracle then you know it handles a lot of stuff for itself that the OS would traditionally do, for example it has its own process scheduling, interprocess communication, filesystem/volume manager, memory management - as of 11g it even talks directly to NFS servers in userland, bypassing the OS filesystem mounts entirely. Once the abstraction layer is ported then yes, it would be just "make" for Oracle itself.

This is how back in the day Oracle ran on 90+ Unix variants...

That was Informix, not Oracle.

Because of different shared memory optimizations in Solaris (especially Solaris 10+) and Linux, there's a non-trivial amount of work involved. I doubt it was anything close to "just type make".

I thought Oracle used Jam, not Make.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com