back to article Oracle showers gold on OpenStack, dreams of open-source splashback

Oracle has started sponsoring an open-source cloud tech that it already uses within its commercial offerings, as the company tentatively embraces a market it once reckoned inconsequential. The company announced on Tuesday that it had become a "Corporate Sponsor" of the OpenStack Foundation, following El Reg reporting in …

COMMENTS

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  1. Mikel

    Oracle: the touch of death for open source

    I guess this is the end of OpenStack.

  2. sysconfig

    I agree. Now they can officially call themselves sponsor, and in the next two years they will fork it, call it something different and license it to their [fill appropriate adjective here] corporate clients with too much cash available. Sounds much like Oracle "Unbreakable" Linux (RedHat Enterprise Linux clone).

    Luckily RHEL is still alive and kicking, unlike MySQL which finds forks and replacements today, like for example MariaDB (with its main driver, the original developer of MySQL).

    On other news, Oracle works on killing Solaris (so far a few enthusiasts with some commercial backing are holding up well - Indiana, SmartOS, Omni etc), and continues butchering Java.

    OpenStack should have set a signal saying: No thanks Oracle, we don't actually want you to be our sponsor. But that takes guts and money from other sources. Too bad. It would have been great PR too.

    1. Mikel

      You forgot one part

      The part where they sue everybody else involved. Can't leave that out.

  3. nematoad

    Oracle?

    This article is a pretty good description of a parasite.

    Take all you can give nothing, or in this case very little, back.

    It's a modus operandi used by others of course, but in this case it's pretty shameless. Even Microsoft contributes some stuff when it wants in on a project that may suit its own ends. For example Samba or Joomla.

    1. tom dial Silver badge

      Re: Oracle?

      Am I wrong or did Microsoft not "contribute" to Samba by making the technical documentation available, for a fee, under compulsion of a court order? If so, that sound much like the best we may expect of Oracle.

      1. Mikel

        Re: Oracle?

        You remember correctly. Also, the documentation was in such a dire state that it was nearly useless. By reverse engineering the protocol in every version of Windows Samba is now the definitive implementation, more compatible than Microsoft's own stuff.

  4. NB

    Not that it really needs to be said but Oracle are a parastic bunch of cunts. They contribute nothing and ruin everything they touch.

    R.I.P OpenStack.

  5. Carl

    oh goody

    I get to wrestle with Oracle's arcane, fidgety stealthily-proprietary-extension-ridden sh1te on another compute platform. How very perfect. I can't wait. Let the champagne corks fly.

  6. Andrew Meredith

    Dashed

    I had high hopes for OpenStack, but if the big O are now moving towards it ....

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Most of the general character of Oracle seems to have been covered by the first posters, but no one has yet mentioned that Oracle's code is probably not wanted.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Yes, I am sure Larry Ellison is going to "shower gold" on OpenStack...

    Someone remind him to zip up his fly afterward.....

  9. comay

    I can't speak for all of Oracle but from the Oracle Solaris side, once the paperwork is complete we plan to be contribute our OpenStack Nova, Neutron and Cinder drivers along with bug fixes, code reviews and just be good, contributing community members.

    As for the why, the answer is pretty simple. Solaris has a number of unique features in terms of file systems (like ZFS), virtualization (Zones combined with fine grained resource management), in-production dynamic tracing across the stack (DTrace), compreshensive fault management (FMA for hardware, SMF for software), network virtualization (Crossbow), safe software lifecycle (boot environments coupled with IPS), etc, etc. The infrastructure there makes ideal building blocks for building up IaaS on x86 or SPARC based systems.

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