8 ms·

Yep, old news 2017. But everybody seems to kinda see about the same thing. Although I'd say it really died when Oracle bought what was left of Sun. And so then

by fargle 7y ago

Yep, old news 2017. But everybody seems to kinda see about the same thing. Although I'd say it really died when Oracle bought what was left of Sun. And so then died java (meh), and everything else, btw. Kinda sad, I think Sun was a fairly innocent victim of the dot-com bubble bust. So fck larry fcking ellison, and I hope the horse he rode in on throws him and then kicks him square in the nuts (I have nothing against the horse).

codesushi42 7y ago
Genuine question, what was so bad about Larry Ellison?
- kick 7y ago
  "As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple!" "This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!'" "You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle." -- Bryan Cantrill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
  - armitron 7y ago
    Bryan Cantrill went on to peddle Node.js to the clueless shortly after that rant so I wouldn't put much weight on what he says.
    - bzbz 7y ago
      To be fair, Node is a hell of a useful tool, given the right context. Don’t pigeonhole it into a box just because the box that he tried to pigeonhole it into isn’t the right fit.
  - a_imho 7y ago
    My takeway from the rant is that Oracle is upfront about being a business.
    - tinus_hn 7y ago
      A proper business serves to improve the world and make money doing so. Oracle serves to make money in whatever sleazy way they can get away with, improving the world has nothing to do with it.
- rswail 7y ago
  ORACLE = One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison Oracle is well known for arbitrary and complex licensing that have the effect of locking customers to Oracle under threats of audits. Recently it has taken to pushing customers via licensing changes on to its own Cloud environment. Its incumbency in F100 companies ensures a vendor lockin that is only slowly deteriorating. Oracle's record of acquisition and product EOL is also well known. It's responsible for the fork of Hudson to Jenkins, the collapse of Solaris, the API court case with Google (attempting to use copyright on API definitions to stop new implementations), the fork of MySQL to MariaDB, etc etc
  - robocat 7y ago
    I hate that VirtualBox is owned by Oracle (Innotek GmbH was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008). I have used VirtualBox for a decade for my VM on Ubuntu - it just worked better than VMWare for me (I recently bought a VMWare licence, but went back to VBox). Ages ago I even tried to pay Oracle for it, since they documented that they wanted USD50 per seat, but when I emailed them they had no way to accept the money! Oracle strikes me as a deeply disfunctional organisation.
    - toast0 7y ago
      > Oracle strikes me as a deeply disfunctional organisation. Sure, they're deeply dysfunctional, but all big corps are pretty dysfunctional about money. I was working for a company purchased by a Fortune 500, and had a bill from a company purchased by Oracle. Between their Accounts Receivable, and our Accounts Payable, once it took about 3 months to pay the quarterly bill. Only some of the dysfunction was Oracle's fault. :P
    - indigochill 7y ago
      >I have used VirtualBox for a decade for my VM on Ubuntu As a long-time VBox user myself, a neat thing I figured out almost by accident the other day: you can port VBox images to QEMU/KVM trivially on Ubuntu (and then use Virtual Machine Manager for the VBox-like graphical front-end). Just unarchive the OVF file from VBox, then use QEMU to convert the resulting VMDK file to your format of choice (such as qcow2). Import your new disk image into VMM and done!
- codesushi42 7y ago
  Oh, shit. I confused Larry Ellison with Scott McNealy. Carry on.
- fargle 7y ago
  - he'd happier destroy 10 or 100 million man-hours of good effort for a couple hundred-K of sales. see Solaris. - trying to assert IP rights on an API. see java lawsuit. - uses vendor lock-in to sell an inferior product that a better replacement is free (like postresql, mysql, etc.) Oh yes, I think Oracle is evil, in a way worse than the worst years of M$. And larry ... is clearly the responsible party. In my ethos, good capitalism is good itself and for everyone. Wise leaders play for the "long game" and this benefits them, their shareholders, and everyone else. This was the pattern of Sun. In particular Sun, even in the years when the UNIX wars were not very nice. larry (and bill) are simply diseased vultures who trade short term personal gain for mass global loss. Someday, while old larry will be fine, his shareholders will have nothing but a bag of sh*t.
sanxiyn 7y ago
Java development is very active. It didn't die.
- fargle 7y ago
  yet... but, it's owned by larry who is not shy (supreme court) to ensure that it's his own, despite an "open" promise.
  - Alupis 7y ago
    > but, it's owned by larry How do you figure? The OpenJDK project maintains the language specifications, and reference libraries, and even a JVM. Oracle is now, just another JVM vendor that takes OpenJDK and compiles it for convenience and/or a support contract - if that's your cup of tea... along with Azul Systems, Red Hat, IBM, AdoptOpenJDK, Amazon, SAP, and more. Some of these vendors also offer proprietary JVM's that claim to focus on some particular problem or offer specific features above-and-beyond reference JVM's. But... for all, OpenJDK project is the standards body - and is not controlled by Oracle.
    - fargle 7y ago
      Not, however, if you call it "Java" (tm). Furthermore, explain the lawsuit where it was won, lost, won again, buried in peat for 3 months, and then pending again? It isn't very open if you get sued for implementing a compatible API.
      - cable2600 7y ago
        Microsoft was sued by Sun for J++ J# using the Java API, Microsoft then made C# to replace it. Dotnet is Microsoft's version of Java that they wrote to eventually cross platform like Java in Dotnet Core.
      - Alupis 7y ago
        > It isn't very open if you get sued for implementing a compatible API. Google was sued for Android's use of a copy of a specific implementation - not for implementing something compatible. Specifically - Android made use of a copy of parts of an Oracle/Sun implementation of Java, instead of writing their own or using OpenJDK (which wasn't mature at the time of the alleged offense). This was all back from a time where Sun owned Java outright, and offered licensed use. Times are quite different now for the Java ecosystem. > Not, however, if you call it "Java" (tm). No, you cannot make a new programming language and call it Java. I think you'll find similar trademark protections on any language. You also couldn't make a new JVM and call it "HotSpot", because Oracle owns that trademark too - but you can call your custom JVM anything else you want. So long as it followed the OpenJDK specifications, it would be compatible with Java bytecode and run Java programs just fine.
pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
Kinda ironic, Sun powered the dot-com bubble.
newnewpdro 7y ago
Sun and SGI both died not because of the dot-com bubble bursting, they died because commodity PCs became competitive with their extremely overpriced offerings, then GNU/Linux enabled the PCs to do all the UNIXy things too. They should have seen the writing on the wall and done something to differentiate themselves meaningfully before the PC wave washed over them. They failed to do so, and could barely afford to keep the lights on at the scale they operated afterwards.
- fargle 7y ago
  Well the other thing was that the surplus market for 6 month old machines undercut their sales. It's true that PC's (amd64) became capable workstations around the same time, or shortly after. And that didn't help. But for the time, the RISC UNIX Workstation was NOT overpriced. If you compare your $1500 core-i7 machine of today to a $30,000 RISC machine of 2001, the later would seem overpriced. But not at all if compared to the $1500 Dell of 2001 running Windows NT 4.0. Remember, things changed very rapidly. And the dot-com burst before Linux and amd64 really happened. In a way, both Linux and x86/amd64 have turned the PC into the UNIX workstation of the 90's and 2000's. And with ONE dominant, excellent, kinda-sorta SVR4 OS too (Linux).
  - newnewpdro 7y ago
    I was working as a sysadmin at hosting companies running thousands of 32-bit x86 Linux boxes, while the dot-com boom was still ongoing. We didn't give Sun a single penny in what would have been fertile land for their machines, if not for GNU/Linux and dirt-cheap powerful PCs. One of the places I worked shared a building with a legacy hosting provider that had nothing but racks of Sun hardware. I had applied to work there first, with nothing but self-taught GNU/Linux knowledge and they laughed me out the door for not knowing anything about "real UNIX". Then I ended up getting a job just one floor below them at younger hosting company, 100% GNU/Linux, and we ate their lunch. It was a microcosm of what was going on everywhere, Sun was doomed.
    - Annatar 7y ago
      But they were correct: if you knew UNIX®️, you automatically groked GNU/Linux (and could see all its deficiencies, as it's a toy), but the other way around does not hold: the gaps in architectural and standards specifications knowledge and concepts are gargantuan (I painfully see that every day at work and must teach to ameliorate the situation where I can, as best I can). You mistake cheap, unreliable PC hardware and too late open sourcing with technical inferiority, where there was none. The truth is that garbage PC hardware and ubiquity of Linux ISO's caused a flood of kids who overnight became "system administrators", which along the 1.95 trillion USD being wiped out caused the market to crash. It's not as trivial as you make it out to be. It also takes far, far more professional, formal education, experience and insight to really be root than just being able to install Linux from an ISO and input a few trivial commands in "bash".
pjmlp 7y ago
Contrary to most HN folks I do appreciate that Oracle has bought Sun in spite of how many things turned out. Apparently on their Oracle-hate rage, everyone is eager that besides an initial offer from IBM, later withdrawn, no other company bothered one second to buy Sun assets. So had Oracle not bought them, even the later killed products would have died on the spot, and in spite of their openness, as talking is cheap, no one else would actually bother to pick them up. Naturally hating Oracle is easier.
- hapless 7y ago
  HP wanted Sun, too, but they couldn't afford it -- IBM and Oracle had better offers.

by fargle 7y ago

codesushi42 7y ago

Genuine question, what was so bad about Larry Ellison?

kick 7y ago
"As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple!" "This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!'" "You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle." -- Bryan Cantrill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
- armitron 7y ago
  Bryan Cantrill went on to peddle Node.js to the clueless shortly after that rant so I wouldn't put much weight on what he says.
  - bzbz 7y ago
    To be fair, Node is a hell of a useful tool, given the right context. Don’t pigeonhole it into a box just because the box that he tried to pigeonhole it into isn’t the right fit.
- a_imho 7y ago
  My takeway from the rant is that Oracle is upfront about being a business.
  - tinus_hn 7y ago
    A proper business serves to improve the world and make money doing so. Oracle serves to make money in whatever sleazy way they can get away with, improving the world has nothing to do with it.
rswail 7y ago
ORACLE = One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison Oracle is well known for arbitrary and complex licensing that have the effect of locking customers to Oracle under threats of audits. Recently it has taken to pushing customers via licensing changes on to its own Cloud environment. Its incumbency in F100 companies ensures a vendor lockin that is only slowly deteriorating. Oracle's record of acquisition and product EOL is also well known. It's responsible for the fork of Hudson to Jenkins, the collapse of Solaris, the API court case with Google (attempting to use copyright on API definitions to stop new implementations), the fork of MySQL to MariaDB, etc etc
- robocat 7y ago
  I hate that VirtualBox is owned by Oracle (Innotek GmbH was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008). I have used VirtualBox for a decade for my VM on Ubuntu - it just worked better than VMWare for me (I recently bought a VMWare licence, but went back to VBox). Ages ago I even tried to pay Oracle for it, since they documented that they wanted USD50 per seat, but when I emailed them they had no way to accept the money! Oracle strikes me as a deeply disfunctional organisation.
  - toast0 7y ago
    > Oracle strikes me as a deeply disfunctional organisation. Sure, they're deeply dysfunctional, but all big corps are pretty dysfunctional about money. I was working for a company purchased by a Fortune 500, and had a bill from a company purchased by Oracle. Between their Accounts Receivable, and our Accounts Payable, once it took about 3 months to pay the quarterly bill. Only some of the dysfunction was Oracle's fault. :P
  - indigochill 7y ago
    >I have used VirtualBox for a decade for my VM on Ubuntu As a long-time VBox user myself, a neat thing I figured out almost by accident the other day: you can port VBox images to QEMU/KVM trivially on Ubuntu (and then use Virtual Machine Manager for the VBox-like graphical front-end). Just unarchive the OVF file from VBox, then use QEMU to convert the resulting VMDK file to your format of choice (such as qcow2). Import your new disk image into VMM and done!
codesushi42 7y ago
Oh, shit. I confused Larry Ellison with Scott McNealy. Carry on.
fargle 7y ago
- he'd happier destroy 10 or 100 million man-hours of good effort for a couple hundred-K of sales. see Solaris. - trying to assert IP rights on an API. see java lawsuit. - uses vendor lock-in to sell an inferior product that a better replacement is free (like postresql, mysql, etc.) Oh yes, I think Oracle is evil, in a way worse than the worst years of M$. And larry ... is clearly the responsible party. In my ethos, good capitalism is good itself and for everyone. Wise leaders play for the "long game" and this benefits them, their shareholders, and everyone else. This was the pattern of Sun. In particular Sun, even in the years when the UNIX wars were not very nice. larry (and bill) are simply diseased vultures who trade short term personal gain for mass global loss. Someday, while old larry will be fine, his shareholders will have nothing but a bag of sh*t.

sanxiyn 7y ago

Java development is very active. It didn't die.

fargle 7y ago
yet... but, it's owned by larry who is not shy (supreme court) to ensure that it's his own, despite an "open" promise.
- Alupis 7y ago
  > but, it's owned by larry How do you figure? The OpenJDK project maintains the language specifications, and reference libraries, and even a JVM. Oracle is now, just another JVM vendor that takes OpenJDK and compiles it for convenience and/or a support contract - if that's your cup of tea... along with Azul Systems, Red Hat, IBM, AdoptOpenJDK, Amazon, SAP, and more. Some of these vendors also offer proprietary JVM's that claim to focus on some particular problem or offer specific features above-and-beyond reference JVM's. But... for all, OpenJDK project is the standards body - and is not controlled by Oracle.
  - fargle 7y ago
    Not, however, if you call it "Java" (tm). Furthermore, explain the lawsuit where it was won, lost, won again, buried in peat for 3 months, and then pending again? It isn't very open if you get sued for implementing a compatible API.
    - cable2600 7y ago
      Microsoft was sued by Sun for J++ J# using the Java API, Microsoft then made C# to replace it. Dotnet is Microsoft's version of Java that they wrote to eventually cross platform like Java in Dotnet Core.
    - Alupis 7y ago
      > It isn't very open if you get sued for implementing a compatible API. Google was sued for Android's use of a copy of a specific implementation - not for implementing something compatible. Specifically - Android made use of a copy of parts of an Oracle/Sun implementation of Java, instead of writing their own or using OpenJDK (which wasn't mature at the time of the alleged offense). This was all back from a time where Sun owned Java outright, and offered licensed use. Times are quite different now for the Java ecosystem. > Not, however, if you call it "Java" (tm). No, you cannot make a new programming language and call it Java. I think you'll find similar trademark protections on any language. You also couldn't make a new JVM and call it "HotSpot", because Oracle owns that trademark too - but you can call your custom JVM anything else you want. So long as it followed the OpenJDK specifications, it would be compatible with Java bytecode and run Java programs just fine.

pg_is_a_butt 7y ago

Kinda ironic, Sun powered the dot-com bubble.

newnewpdro 7y ago

Sun and SGI both died not because of the dot-com bubble bursting, they died because commodity PCs became competitive with their extremely overpriced offerings, then GNU/Linux enabled the PCs to do all the UNIXy things too. They should have seen the writing on the wall and done something to differentiate themselves meaningfully before the PC wave washed over them. They failed to do so, and could barely afford to keep the lights on at the scale they operated afterwards.

fargle 7y ago
Well the other thing was that the surplus market for 6 month old machines undercut their sales. It's true that PC's (amd64) became capable workstations around the same time, or shortly after. And that didn't help. But for the time, the RISC UNIX Workstation was NOT overpriced. If you compare your $1500 core-i7 machine of today to a $30,000 RISC machine of 2001, the later would seem overpriced. But not at all if compared to the $1500 Dell of 2001 running Windows NT 4.0. Remember, things changed very rapidly. And the dot-com burst before Linux and amd64 really happened. In a way, both Linux and x86/amd64 have turned the PC into the UNIX workstation of the 90's and 2000's. And with ONE dominant, excellent, kinda-sorta SVR4 OS too (Linux).
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  I was working as a sysadmin at hosting companies running thousands of 32-bit x86 Linux boxes, while the dot-com boom was still ongoing. We didn't give Sun a single penny in what would have been fertile land for their machines, if not for GNU/Linux and dirt-cheap powerful PCs. One of the places I worked shared a building with a legacy hosting provider that had nothing but racks of Sun hardware. I had applied to work there first, with nothing but self-taught GNU/Linux knowledge and they laughed me out the door for not knowing anything about "real UNIX". Then I ended up getting a job just one floor below them at younger hosting company, 100% GNU/Linux, and we ate their lunch. It was a microcosm of what was going on everywhere, Sun was doomed.
  - Annatar 7y ago
    But they were correct: if you knew UNIX®️, you automatically groked GNU/Linux (and could see all its deficiencies, as it's a toy), but the other way around does not hold: the gaps in architectural and standards specifications knowledge and concepts are gargantuan (I painfully see that every day at work and must teach to ameliorate the situation where I can, as best I can). You mistake cheap, unreliable PC hardware and too late open sourcing with technical inferiority, where there was none. The truth is that garbage PC hardware and ubiquity of Linux ISO's caused a flood of kids who overnight became "system administrators", which along the 1.95 trillion USD being wiped out caused the market to crash. It's not as trivial as you make it out to be. It also takes far, far more professional, formal education, experience and insight to really be root than just being able to install Linux from an ISO and input a few trivial commands in "bash".

pjmlp 7y ago

Contrary to most HN folks I do appreciate that Oracle has bought Sun in spite of how many things turned out. Apparently on their Oracle-hate rage, everyone is eager that besides an initial offer from IBM, later withdrawn, no other company bothered one second to buy Sun assets. So had Oracle not bought them, even the later killed products would have died on the spot, and in spite of their openness, as talking is cheap, no one else would actually bother to pick them up. Naturally hating Oracle is easier.

hapless 7y ago
HP wanted Sun, too, but they couldn't afford it -- IBM and Oracle had better offers.