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Despite the win, I think it would have been far better for the computer industry if Google had bought Sun. Unlike other companies with crap (IMHO ... Nokia, Mot

by tostitos1979 10y ago

Despite the win, I think it would have been far better for the computer industry if Google had bought Sun. Unlike other companies with crap (IMHO ... Nokia, Motorola), Sun actually had stuff of value. This is a lesson that geeks get but I'm not sure MBAs do or will ever get.

lallysingh 10y ago
Agreed. Google may have made a better steward of Java than Oracle. But I don't know what tech Google would've directly benefitted from. They could've ported dtrace and zfs (and changed licenses) to Linux. But they'd have to keep all those support contracts going, which is a pain. That's more Oracle-side.
a3n 10y ago
Yeah. Thank you Sun, for ... everything, including employing the people you employed.
- dguaraglia 10y ago
  Interesting that you mention that. When I was back in university (early 2000s) there were a few "big companies" to work for. If you cared about having the perks, the money and a cool office, you wanted to work for Microsoft. If you were more of a reclusive neckbeard with a love for the more arcane aspects of computing and networking (like I was), you wanted to work for Sun. It was seen as the place where you'd be free to work on cool research projects rather than (god forbid!) consumer software. That's where the luminaries were. Of course, even back then nobody wanted to work for IBM or HP. Heh.
  - tostitos1979 10y ago
    At IBM, the Watson, Almaden and other research labs used to be the place to be.
farcical_tinpot 10y ago
I often wondered why Google didn't. Simply owning Java alone and heading off this inevitable nonsense would have been enough reason. This kind of legal stuff is really the only way Sun were going to make money from Java. Heaven knows, Java has continued in spite of Sun, not because of them. The trouble is, they would have had to keep a lot of legacy crap going like Solaris and SPARC which probably wouldn't have appealed to them. Sun was, and still is, haemorrhaging cash.
rodgerd 10y ago
Sources at the time told me IBM were planning on buying Sun (for the hardware/Telco business) and avoiding anti-trust problems by spinning software off to Red Hat (Java, ZFS, Solaris, etc). They got cold feet over the spectre of bribery investigations against Sun. I weep for the parallel universe in which Red Hat had been in a position to open all of Sun's technologies properly.
- byuu 10y ago
  RedHat? I don't. Had that happened, Java, ZFS, MySQL, VirtualBox, etc would now likely all be required components of systemd. (Yes, I'm being a little facetious, but I really believe RedHat has some sinister ulterier motives. They've been absolutely horrible with systemd, Gnome, GTK3, etc.) What happened to Sun was an outright catastrophe, but we've mostly recovered with OpenZFS, MariaDB, Jenkins, LibreOffice, etc. The major piece we're missing is a clean fork of VirtualBox. Android's also not in a good state to replace desktop Java, but it could conceivably be one day at least.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Except Google is not that good in language design.
  - kagamine 10y ago
    To be fair, I use VB every day and it is getting frequent updates and hasn't crashed in 2 years, it used to crash quite often when Sun developed it. Maybe it could be something better, or amazing and different, but it's still free and very stable, so I'm quite happy.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  My understanding is that Schwartz et al declined IBM's bid and chose to proceed with Oracle's, under the assumption that Oracle's superior business record would mean more stability for Sun employees.

lallysingh 10y ago

Agreed. Google may have made a better steward of Java than Oracle. But I don't know what tech Google would've directly benefitted from. They could've ported dtrace and zfs (and changed licenses) to Linux. But they'd have to keep all those support contracts going, which is a pain. That's more Oracle-side.

a3n 10y ago

Yeah. Thank you Sun, for ... everything, including employing the people you employed.

dguaraglia 10y ago
Interesting that you mention that. When I was back in university (early 2000s) there were a few "big companies" to work for. If you cared about having the perks, the money and a cool office, you wanted to work for Microsoft. If you were more of a reclusive neckbeard with a love for the more arcane aspects of computing and networking (like I was), you wanted to work for Sun. It was seen as the place where you'd be free to work on cool research projects rather than (god forbid!) consumer software. That's where the luminaries were. Of course, even back then nobody wanted to work for IBM or HP. Heh.
- tostitos1979 10y ago
  At IBM, the Watson, Almaden and other research labs used to be the place to be.

farcical_tinpot 10y ago

I often wondered why Google didn't. Simply owning Java alone and heading off this inevitable nonsense would have been enough reason. This kind of legal stuff is really the only way Sun were going to make money from Java. Heaven knows, Java has continued in spite of Sun, not because of them. The trouble is, they would have had to keep a lot of legacy crap going like Solaris and SPARC which probably wouldn't have appealed to them. Sun was, and still is, haemorrhaging cash.

rodgerd 10y ago

Sources at the time told me IBM were planning on buying Sun (for the hardware/Telco business) and avoiding anti-trust problems by spinning software off to Red Hat (Java, ZFS, Solaris, etc). They got cold feet over the spectre of bribery investigations against Sun. I weep for the parallel universe in which Red Hat had been in a position to open all of Sun's technologies properly.

byuu 10y ago
RedHat? I don't. Had that happened, Java, ZFS, MySQL, VirtualBox, etc would now likely all be required components of systemd. (Yes, I'm being a little facetious, but I really believe RedHat has some sinister ulterier motives. They've been absolutely horrible with systemd, Gnome, GTK3, etc.) What happened to Sun was an outright catastrophe, but we've mostly recovered with OpenZFS, MariaDB, Jenkins, LibreOffice, etc. The major piece we're missing is a clean fork of VirtualBox. Android's also not in a good state to replace desktop Java, but it could conceivably be one day at least.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Except Google is not that good in language design.
- kagamine 10y ago
  To be fair, I use VB every day and it is getting frequent updates and hasn't crashed in 2 years, it used to crash quite often when Sun developed it. Maybe it could be something better, or amazing and different, but it's still free and very stable, so I'm quite happy.
cookiecaper 10y ago
My understanding is that Schwartz et al declined IBM's bid and chose to proceed with Oracle's, under the assumption that Oracle's superior business record would mean more stability for Sun employees.