On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 8:58 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (opensolarisisdeadlongliveopensolaris) < opensolarisisdeadlongliveopensola...@nedharvey.com> wrote:
> > From: Tim Cook [mailto:t...@cook.ms] > > > > Why would I spend all that time and > > energy participating in ANOTHER list controlled by Oracle, when they have > > shown they have no qualms about eliminating it with basically 0 warning, > at > > their whim? > > From an open source, community perspective, I understand and agree with > this sentiment. If OSS projects behave this way, they die. The purpose of > an oracle-hosted mailing list is not for the sake of being open in any way. > It's for the sake of allowing public discussions about their product. > While a certain amount of knowledge will exist with or without the list > (people can still download solaris 11 for evaluation purposes and test it > out on the honor system) there will be less oracle-specific knowledge in > existence without the list. For anyone who's 100% dedicated to OSS and/or > illumos and doesn't care about oracle-specific stuff, there's no reason to > use that list. But for those of us who are sysadmins, developers using > eval-licensed solaris, or in any way not completely closed to the > possibility of using oracle zfs / solaris... For those of us, it makes > sense. > > Guess what, I formerly subscribed to netapp-toasters as well. Until zfs > came along and I was able to happily put netapp in my past. Perhaps > someday I'll leave zfs behind in favor of btrfs. But not yet. > > Guess what also, there is a very active thriving Microsoft forum out there > too. And they don't even let you download MS Office or Windows for > evaluation purposes - they're even more closed than Oracle in this regard. > They learned their lesson about piracy and the honor system. ;-) > > We can agree to disagree. I think you're still operating under the auspices of Oracle wanting to have an open discussion. This is patently false. There's a reason why anytime someone has an issue the response from the Oracle team that posts here is almost always "open a support ticket and give me the number". And then we never hear about it again/get the fix unless the end-user happens to come back and update us. If you think that Oracle is going to change that stance with a list hosted on Java.net, you're sadly mistaken. Their (collectively, I'm not speaking of any individual) only goal is to help paying customers. Period. The way they've decided to go about that is by hoarding knowledge. I've dealt with the company for over a decade, there will be no open discussions. NetApp has historically been open with their user community (although at times in recent history they have made the mistake of turtling up), which is why the toasters mailing list did as well as it did. Hell, Dave Hitz used to be a regular poster. MS forums are active and thriving because they've got a massive user base full of extremely experienced admins. If there was an open and free version of the MS products, I'm willing to bet that you'd find the closed source version a ghost town. For all the bashing MS has taken throughout history, they're a very open company relatively speaking. I can both browse their knowledge base and download hotfixes without any support contract. If you're going to have to open a support ticket to get help with issues anyways, why bother with a mailing list/forum? Just go straight to support. The reason THESE lists have done so well is because the guys who wrote the code actively participate and give detailed help in the open. If the only responses that ever came here were the Oracle responses to open up a ticket beyond anything but basic problems, this place would've died a long time ago. I think the saddest part of the whole situation is Oracle is so backwards and broken they don't even allow their employees to tell us what they aren't allowed to talk to us about. THAT is f-ed. --Tim
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