Arch Linux Replaces MySQL With MariaDB

[schmidtbag]

My understanding, at the time, was that first and foremost Oracle was purchasing Sun to prevent their competitors from controlling Java in a way that would be harmful to Oracle's business. Keep in mind that Sun was only the third largest acquisition in Oracle's history. PeopleSoft and BEA, #1 and #2 respectively, were Java applications and middleware vendors. So it's not about "doing something with Java", it's more about "preventing others from doing something with Java that might hurt Oracle."

Secondary, from what I gathered back then, was the hardware division. I haven't been keeping up with what's going on there, but I recall reading about how the SPARC relationship with Fujitsu appeared to be falling apart, and that had me raising eyebrows. But, then again, Oracle's got a reputation for aggressive decision-making, so I guess it shouldn't be too surprising.

I never saw any analysis of how valuable Sun's patent portfolio was to Oracle, but I have to agree that that must surely have been a major driver as well. I mean, shit, just think of how much stuff is out there that started as a Sun project.

So them's the big three, as I see it. As for everything else, well...

Stuff like OO.o, Solaris, ZFS and MySQL was probably just icing to them. I can't imagine Oracle being interested in any of those in a stand-alone purchase, even at a bargain price. Keep in mind that with the later three in that four that I mention, Oracle already had competing products available or in development (Unbreakable Linux, Btrfs, and their existing plethora of database technologies).

So, in short, the Sun stuff that interests us most is the Sun stuff that probably interested Oracle the least.

Thanks for the info, it's a real shame though. They could've at least done free and paid versions of the programs so they'd make SOME profit while having an ambition to maintain the products. Also, why couldn't Oracle have just bought the rights of Java from Sun? Or, why couldn't they affiliate themselves with Sun where they could have a say in what ends up in Java and what doesn't? I feel like buying out a company for ONE product is not only selfish but cost ineffective. I feel like it'd have been cheaper to just develop their own language, and if their developers suck too much to do that, it'd still be cheaper to bribe Sun devs to join them.

[Serge]

Thanks for the info, it's a real shame though. They could've at least done free and paid versions of the programs so they'd make SOME profit while having an ambition to maintain the products. Also, why couldn't Oracle have just bought the rights of Java from Sun? Or, why couldn't they affiliate themselves with Sun where they could have a say in what ends up in Java and what doesn't? I feel like buying out a company for ONE product is not only selfish but cost ineffective. I feel like it'd have been cheaper to just develop their own language, and if their developers suck too much to do that, it'd still be cheaper to bribe Sun devs to join them.

From what I recall, there was an IBM attempt to buy Sun that fell apart, and then HP was rumored to be interested but that didn't go anywhere. I'm gonna speculate a bit, but Sun probably didn't want to start selling off its assets piece-meal as it would leave the parts no one wanted harder to sell.

As for buying a company for just one product, again I'm gonna speculate, but look at the PeopleSoft and BEA purchases. PeopleSoft was something like $10 billion (short scale), and BEA was like $8 bil. Plus Oracle already had a robust app and middleware business on top of Java before those purchases. If another company could take control of Java and act in a way that would make it harder for Oracle's existing business, we're talking about losing profits across several business units. Not only would Oracle's stock fall from the loss of profitability, but also from loss of confidence in Oracle's decision-making because of how much Oracle had already spent on Java business. Still, $7.5 bil or w/e it was that Oracle spent on Sun is a lot of money, which is why I mention the other top things that Oracle got out of the purchase besides protecting their Java businesses. The hardware division, for example, enabled Oracle to sell a complete solution where they own everything top to bottom: the hardware, the OS, and the software that runs on that. That's nice, on paper. Looks like Oracle's fucking it up top to bottom as well, but hey, Oracle is Oracle.

The above also applies to why they couldn't just develop their own. They had too much already invested in Java business, plus how the hell would their own solution ever see the same kind of market adoption that Java already had?

Anyway, I don't really hate Oracle. I think they're bad for FOSS, no doubt, but I admire the fact that everything they do, not just to FOSS but even with the big stuff like rejecting SAP's settlement offer just so they could drag SAP's and HP's officers onto the witness stand, supports the notion that they really, really don't care about PR or corporate image. Every year, Oracle seems to find a new way to say, "We don't care what the rest of the world thinks of us, it's our business and we're gonna do whatever we want." In a world of corporate gloss-over bullshit, it's actually refreshing to find a company that huge that is so openly brutal and uncaring.

But yeah, they're definitely bad for FOSS.

[Fenrin]

Is this stuff Gnome-only?

I never tested it on other DE's. But if you install all it's dependencies, it should work on most other DE's as well. Compiling it on a non GNOME3 distro might be PITA. But most modern major distros have this probably in their repository.