On Mon, 2010-06-07 at 17:29 -0700, Giovanni Tirloni wrote:
> > For the folks who *don't* work at Oracle (of which I
> > am now one), I
> > think your actions are actively destructive. At this
> > point, the
> > community needs Oracle more than Oracle needs the
> > community, and doing
> > anything which might drive Oracle to walk away from
> > this community is
> > destructive and ultimately such a result would be a
> > shame.
> >
> > -- Garrett
>
> I would make a distinction between a community of external developers/active
> contributors and a community of users and enthusiasts. It's true that Oracle
> currently doesn't need the former. Can it afford to lose the later in the
> long run ? I don't think so since those are potential/current customers. All
> the IOUC conference calls and user groups talks show Oracle cares about that
> community.
>
> Since Oracle/Sun doesn't seem interested in effectively reaping the benefits
> of massive external participation (which translates in lots of small
> contributions in all areas and rarely huge ones), I can only wonder how does
> it view other 3rd-party companies selling systems and hardware running on top
> of OpenSolaris. It *feels* like the worst of both worlds: they still don't
> get huge contributions back and also lose money on hardware sales and support
> contracts. It's must be hard to quantify how much those contributions help
> compared to the losses. The same goes for the argument that keeping the
> OpenSolaris.org infrastructure running is too costly. We are probably never
> going to see any numbers so it's all guesswork and subject to speculation.
>
> Oracle has not inherited an easy situation here. The outlook for Solaris seem
> to be slowly shaping up. OpenSolaris still needs more attention.
>
I'd argue that Oracle doesn't much care about OpenSolaris, except in so
far as OpenSolaris supports Solaris.
A community of users of a free operating system that costs it millions
of dollars a year to sustain, and that doesn't generate any revenue, is
probably not terribly interesting to folks who are focused on profit.
Now if you can figure out how to turn that community of users into a
profit center, exceeding the millions of dollars a year you invest in
it, now *that* would be no doubt interesting.
Of course, Sun failed to be able to do this. Oracle has not
demonstrated that it even wants to try. (Arguably, Oracle has more
pressing demands with a much more direct impact on revenue.)
- Garrett
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