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It is very unlikely that Oracle will do the right thing. Oracle, as a company, is known to be ethically challenged. A company like Oracle that is known for its

• beefhash 9y ago
  On the topic of Oracle and its corporate culture, you may also want to see part of the talk "Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos" by Byran Cantrill[1]. The language he uses to talk about Oracle is rather colorful. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m
  • digi_owl 9y ago
    Cantrill seems to have a flair for using colorful language in general...
• pjmlp 9y ago
  Not defending Oracle here, however I have learned working all these years in the context of Fortune 500 company cultures, that they are not alone. The way Oracle as company behaves, is quite common in that universe. I will miss having Solaris around.
  • samoright 9y ago
    I have worked in Oracle for 2 years and I have worked at other Fortune 500 companies. Oracle, by far, is the most soulless and lethargic company among all of them.
    • pjmlp 9y ago
      Sure, not all of them are the same. However those with heavy use of external consulting and off-shoring, seem to come pretty close.
      • sacheendra 9y ago
        I don't understand the negativity towards using consultants and off-shoring. Using consultants is a business decision which helps the company hire people for the short term of the project and also offload risk. Not all companies have the capability to handle all kinds of risk. For example, software companies don't specialise in financial models and investing. So they don't take on financial risks by investing in derivatives and other instruments to make profit. Whenever possible, risk outside core competencies is outsourced. This is good for the company as then it can focus on the core business and make money. Off-shoring is bad in the sense that jobs are lost in the local economy. But, this is again similar to having a factory in China as opposed to San Francisco. It brings in more expertise at a reduced cost. Off-shoring helps make things cheaper in the end. For example, as your insurance company uses off-shore consultants to make their software, it is cheaper directly translating to lower insurance premiums. the same for many other products. While I understand that software is a different beast to build unlike toys or other products. Once built, the normal theories of economics still apply.
        • Retric 9y ago
          They both reduce institutional knowlage. This tends to be extremely detrimental in the long term. Outsourcing software is like burning all the design documentation for hardware your having someone else build. Even something as well known as injection molding tends to work vastly better if you have experienced staff as part of the design process. And software is worse than that because the design process is part of development, so outsourcing means you don't even understand the problem space.
          • deleted 9y ago
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• johan_larson 9y ago
  Is open-sourcing a codebase for an abandoned product somehow expensive or complicated? Are there legal or accounting issues? If not, it seems like buying a bit of good-will for the price of a bit of paperwork would be a useful investment.
  • Someone 9y ago
    Legal concerns: do we really own this code? If there is code in there that turns out to be copy-pasted from somewhere else, open sourcing makes it more likely that people will find it. That could be expensive (e.g. when some BigCo owns the copyright on code they have been selling for decades) and/or have even more serious consequences (e.g. when there's a GPL-licensed code fragment in there, and they linked it with a part they want to keep commercial) Answering that question conclusively can be very expensive. They may not have a full history of the code, and if they have, it may not contain all metadata needed.k
    • justincormack 9y ago
      But it was already open sourced once before, so much of that work was done already.
      • Someone 9y ago
        Valid point, so here is a similar, but different reason: patents. They may fear releasing the source opens them for patent lawsuits or may have patents they aren't willing to give up, and fear that open sourcing it without any patent clause will not give them much goodwill.
    • DonHopkins 9y ago
      That's the problem James Gosling encountered trying to convince Sun to release the NeWS source code for free. Parts of it like the font rendering code were owned by AT&T and other companies.
  • hu88 9y ago
    I was at Intel once upon a time when they open sourced some telecom stuff they wanted to get out off. The issues were crazy because of the size of the code base that had accumulated from multiple acquisitions spanning many different divisions in different countries over many years. We couldn't even find people who could tell us what large chunks of the code did or whether they contained anything under patent, trademark etc. It's can be quite expensive and the only reason we did it was there were customers who were willing to pay for the effort.
• xgbi 9y ago
  I like that quote in the interview: > Also, asked whether in hindsight he would have preferred Sun having been acquired by IBM (which pursued a deal to acquire Sun and then backed out late in the game) rather than Oracle, Gosling said he and at least Sun Chairman Scott McNealy debated the prospect. And the consensus, led by McNealy, was that although they said they believed "Oracle would be more savage, IBM would make more layoffs."