On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 2:20 PM, Ken Gunderson <[email protected]>wrote:
> > On Fri, 2010-03-26 at 04:14 -0700, Richard L. Hamilton wrote: > > > There is more information here: > > > > > > http://www.cio.com/article/588163/Oracle_Enacts_all_Or > > > _Nothing_Hardware_Support_Policy?taxonomyId=3234 > > > > Presuming it to be accurate, there are a couple of considerations > > that approach misses: > > > > * some of today's home/educational/small business have influence > > over tomorrow's enterprise IT budgets. Indeed, some people are > > concurrently in both roles, and those are probably among the more > > knowledgeable. > > No doubt. And they often turn up via contacts that are least expected. > Bridges once burned.... > It's Google's "Don't be evil" turned upsite down. I agree it will hurt them more than they expect. > > > * while there's no profit in committing oneself to support unpaying > users, > > they're still good for one (other) thing (assuming they have a way to > provide it): > > feedback/bug reports. Every time some nobody finds and reports a bug > > before a paying customer does, you don't look like an idiot in front of > the > > folks that pay the bills. > > Smart companies do not define "profitable" _solely_ in terms of dollars. > Not everything can be quantified, e.g. the value of the goodwill you > create. Or don't. Sun was on the path to building credible goodwill in > the Open Source world these past few years. Oracle, in less than two > months has destroyed it. > > The real impetus behind this is pure arrogance. Nobody w/o a few > million in their pocket matters to Larry. But then he's also building > up one heck of a karmic debt and sooner or later the universe will > collect. Not that that provides much consolation for the abused. > Although I'm more than unsatisfied with Oracle's actions (or lack of) I'll play the devil's advocate here. He just spent a huge amount of his shareholders' dollars buying a company that had great technology but wasn't doing well in the market ($$$). He has to show immediate results to them and that's why I think Oracle is focusing its statements on the high-end side of the market and making changes like the one done to Solaris 10 licensing/support that probably will yield quick returns. Oracle's is not a newcommer to the open source world but it's not a Red Hat either. Being an outsider I've no idea about this but... does Oracle think Solaris is competing against AIX & HP-UX or is it Linux/BSD ? That will probably play some role in how much support they will provide to OpenSolaris. Personally I'm an open source advocate so any software business model that is closed will have to try hard to convince me that it's better than all the community can provide in testing, bug reporting, free marketing, free support, etc. But if Oracle is exclusively focusing on taking market share from AIX and HP-UX, perhaps Larry can look at it as a "I have more developers working on Solaris then you" and disregard the outside contributions completely. -- Giovanni
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