Martin,
This is a fundamental misstatement of Oracle's position as a software
vendor prior to acquiring Sun. Oracle faces considerable competition
from sources such as MS SQL Server and DB2. It has nothing like a
monopoly over the RDBMS market. To the extent that it does have a
position as a leader, it attracts a great deal of attention from
competition and anti-trust authorities in both the US and EU, where
you likely are aware that it had to make numerous representations that
it would not use MySQL via the Sun acquisitions to engage in anti-
competitive behaviour and that it was committed to supporting further
development of MySQL under GPL. Their competitive position is not at
all recognisable from your description.
Moreover, Oracle is a company run by people with backgrounds in
finance, a lot of concern for how they are viewed by the capital
markets, and a lot of experience in acquiring companies (just look at
the list on their Wikipedia entry). These folks aren't making
leveraged buyouts in the private equity style of a few years ago,
buying companies, saddling them with debt, and gutting their assets.
There's no evidence to support the notion that they would spend 7.4bn
USD on Sun just to dump assets that they had identified as "crown
jewels" in selling the due diligence they did on the deal,
particularly when this was a 47% premium on Sun's stock price at the
time the offer was tendered and a bit more than IBM was said to table.
Nor would it make any sense for them to do so after having their most
senior executives show up to talk up the closing of the acquisition by
naming SPARC and Solaris as growth areas for the acquired business
that were expected to enjoy considerable expansions in headcount. If
they said this after completing the deal but by that time
fundamentally didn't understand what they acquired or misrepresented
their plans for it, they would be pilloried by precisely those
constituencies they most closely court in running in their company.
They might even end up with a shareholder lawsuit for material
misrepresentations about the merger or failure to conduct due
diligence. Which is to say: it is deeply naive for you to talk about
"how deciders decide" when jumping over very substantial financial and
legal considerations and contradicting statements on public record. To
the extent that Oracle is precisely the kind of calculating
corporation you say they are, they are extremely unlikely to arrive at
the conclusions or use the reasoning you suggest, unless you mean to
say that they are either substantively incompetent and/or malfeasant.
Whatever your concerns, introducing these kinds of accusatory remarks
into the discussion is fundamentally counterproductive and leads
people to worry about problems they don't have rather than those that
they do. By any reasonable lights, the fundamental problem here isn't
that Oracle corporate management harbour some nefarious agenda for
their new acquisition, which they are carrying forward with utter
duplicity, but that they fail to realise that both the community and
more so segments of the customer base need further and firmer
assurances than those already on record. Why not rather put on a wider
view while we're waiting and show balanced, strategic rather than
panicked thinking going into those exchanges?
The rumours of Solaris's death have been repeatedly greatly
exaggerated. I don't see why the current bout with OpenSolaris would
be any different. If it does end tragically, the scene currently being
dressed bears an unfortunate resemblance to the end of Romeo and
Juliet, wherein the first of two suicides is prematurely occasioned by
mistaking the artificially comatose beloved for dead.
Cheers,
Bayard
Am 21 Apr 2010 um 13:28 schrieb Martin Bochnig:
Do you get it or don´t you????
Oracle´s DB is pretty much a monopoly. *There* they can do whatever
they want, including not doing it, deferring it by 10 years or cooking
honey.
I shall calm down? Who is using uppercase letters here?
Who is shouting??
OpenSolaris is an operating system platform. Even more so, as SPARC is
a hardware platform that 99% depends on (Open)Solaris.
This doesn´t even have much to do with OSS, community interaction,
culture or anything.
It has to do with how deciders decide. They wont invest hundreds of
thousands of $$$, if not millions, into a platform they know nothing
about. And I can understand that. Oracle is too naive for this little
calculation? I doubt this.
If you SHOUT IN CAPITAL LETTERS, that others shall ^calm down^ (this
reminds me of an old joke, or was it self-irony??), Oracle is losing
the UNIX market through their
No-Statement__No-Roadmap__No-Assurance__No-Platform-Security policies.
That is a fact. They made it happen.
Not I invented that.
Bit it is how it happens to be.
%mab
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