The January rumours were true and on Friday Oracle laid off the core talent from the Solaris and SPARC teams, in effect finally killing what they had left of Sun Microsystems. When Oracle aquired Sun, there were a lot of valuable assets, each of which, except VirtualBox, has been squandered and abandoned. Simon Phipps enumerates the main ones and what happened to them.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by terrab0t on Tuesday September 05 2017, @05:56PM (4 children)
The customers.
I’m sure they lost some along the way, but they were the assets Oracle bought Sun for. They kept those technologies alive for this long to give them time to transition those customers over to other things, or to milk them for support money as long as possible while putting nothing into R&D.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday September 05 2017, @07:58PM (3 children)
Like what, for instance?
Other than Java-related stuff - what exactly?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DECbot on Tuesday September 05 2017, @08:16PM (2 children)
I thought the purchase was to ensure MySQL never developed the necessary feature set to directly challenge Oracle's own dbms.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Tuesday September 05 2017, @11:35PM (1 child)
On the other hand, Mysql was (dual-licensed but) GPL, meaning that Oracle would have to release (major portions of) their dbms if they took Mysql code and incorporated it.
Whereas, now, Oracle is the copyright holder and can do what they darn well please with Mysql, including incorporating parts into their proprietary dbms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 06 2017, @06:08AM
Not true. They could choose to use the other license, they just can't change the license if they don't own the code.
So anybody who has the gpl licensed code can continue to use it under the gpl if they wish and Oracle doesn't have to provide any of their changes if the other license doesn't require it.