back to article Oracle kills Sun.com after starvation diet

Oracle is killing Sun.com, the online home of Sun Microsystems and one of the oldest dot-com domain names. An entry on the Oracle's OTN Garage says that sun.com will be decommissioned on June 1. The closure comes after Sun's new owner, Oracle, moved most of the content on BigAdmin, OpenSolaris.com, and some sections of Sun …

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  1. Conrad Longmore
    Thumb Up

    I'll give 'em..

    I'll give 'em $50 for it.

  2. GrumpyJoe
    Happy

    So can I buy it?

    If it's no longer being used I assume they are going to put it back in the pot - how much I wonder?

  3. bikerboi87

    ouch

    that domain name is older than me.....

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Unhappy

      Reply to post: ouch

      Now you're making me feel really old :(

      1. alwarming
        Paris Hilton

        Re: Reply to post: ouch

        It's older than Megan Fox as well.

        Surprising (to me) to see how many of those oldest name are still around. (intel, hp, ibm, amd to name a few). dec.com redirects to hp.com now..

    2. raving angry loony

      The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

      Thanks for the reminder of how old I am.

      I hate you. I really do.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    and all the URLS will break

    Every web page, every HTML documentation page that points to some bit of the Java API, is now broken. Nice

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  5. David Hicks

    Shame that so many old domains are out of use

    dec.com is vaguely still in use by HP.

    Octopus.com is up for sale, auctioning having reached almost 50,000 dollars before the auction was suspended a couple of weeks ago because someone started a domain ownership dispute with ICANN.

    Mentat.com is just not there, looks like it's owned by someone that's most likely waiting for a cash-in. That's the tragedy with most of the decent single-word domains in the world, some 'investor' (I use that word layered with the most sarcastic venom I possibly can) has usually bought them up, slapped a cheapass portal and some ads on them and a big banner "domain for sale". So now nobody can use them. Bastards.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Paris Hilton

      Well, they _can_...

      They just have to dig a little deeper in their pocket for 'em. Hey-ho. First-come-first-served.

      B'sides, you didn't really think they'd sit unallocated for long before some Joe Normal just happened to trip over 'em, did you?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Not to mention MySQL

    Anyone noticed the fork "MariaDB"?

    It's a community-driven fork of MySQL started by a group of users who were concerned about MySQL's well-being since Oracle now owns it.

    The beauty of open source, if a company takes over the code base, and you don't like the direction they're taking the project, you're free to fork it and go it alone.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Happy

      Forking

      @Stuart Longland:

      Or by the sound of things, fork the code and leave Oracle to go it alone.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Or

        Or by the *sound* of things, just... fork Oracle and go it alone.

  7. Joe 19
    Unhappy

    Will there be an anniversary?

    For the day the Sun.com died?

  8. Duncan Macdonald

    Why ?

    To keep a domain registration costs under $20 per year so why kill the domain - just have a redirect to the Oracle home page. (Unless they are thinking of selling the domain name to the Sun newspaper (a low end rag in the UK).)

    1. /dev/null

      Already redirecting

      They've already done that - www.sun.com redirects to www.oracle.com/us/sun/index.html.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: a low end rag in the UK

      but is that Aussie Rupert, owner of said, red top rag lower than Larry?

  9. James Marten
    Welcome

    @Duncan Macdonald

    Probably Oracle's desire to totally eliminate any traces of the-company-formerly-known-as-Sun from everything that is under their control. This is what usually happens when a company gets taken over, the management would probably say "to build loyalty". The small outfit that I joined just before it was taken over by Sun had to quickly eliminate all traces of its former name, by order from the top. But their former domain name is now registered to myself - it's not valuable, but just good to keep for sentimental reasons.

  10. Code Monkey

    Sad

    sun.com has been such a contstant. It's been my "test the connection" URL for 15 years.

  11. Paul Hayes 1

    domain

    I bet Oracle will keep the sun.com domain registered to them. They wouldn't want someone to buy it and use it for anything, they seem intent on completely wiping the Sun name from history.

    I noticed "java.sun.com" started re-directing to an Oracle URL some time ago.

  12. Francis Vaughan

    SOP

    Many years ago there was a lovely supercomputer company called Thinking Machines. Sadly, along with most of the other supercomputer startups of the time, they didn't survive. But as they failed their assets were sold off. Sun got most of the hardware expertise, plus the compilers, some of which surfaced in a limited manner. The service division was sold off, and the last functioning component, which was the data mining software operation, still called Thinking Machines, was bought by Oracle. So curiously Oracle now owns essentially all of the old Thinking Machines.

    Thinking Machines had domain names, tmc.com, thinkingmachines.com, and think.com. Oracle kept the last of these. It is now their K-12 education site. Nary a trace of the once glorious supercomputer company that made arguably the sexiest machines on the planet.

  13. Tim Jenkins

    Lovely (64-bit) jubblies

    I always got a smile out of thinking how much incoming sun.com traffic was from proper UK geezers wanting to check out gorgeous Courtney from Croydon (34-26-32) and her in-depth knowledge of large-scale symmetric multiprocessing on SPARC...

  14. spiny norman
    Joke

    Listing

    Is it time to have historic URL listings, like the UK has for old buildings? That way, Oracle would have had to get the conservation officer in before they could change anything on the Sun website.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      They are already sort of doing this

      The internet wayback machine is housed on the Sun campus.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Sun Campus

        Which one, the Menlo Park one that Oracle have just sold to Facebook? Or Santa Clara?

  15. NogginTheNog
    Pint

    Humans!

    Don't people get sentimental over the funniest little things...?

    I include myself very much in the above ;-)

  16. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    WTF is a Database company...

    ...doing buying a hardware and operating system company anyway?

    Surely Sun/Solaris had more value as an independant company, rather than being aquired and then brand-obliterated by the fuktards at Oracle?

    1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

      Re: WTF is Oracle doing?

      Actually I don't think Sun had much value, which is why they are no more, but I really don't know what Oracle are up to. They appear to have either cancelled or lost most of the products. They are clearly hell-bent on removing the brands from public view.

      That leaves the workforce, I suppose. Presumably they thought that there were a lot of good engineers being wasted on daft ideas and that they could retain enough of them to make the whole exercise worthwhile just as a massive headhunting expedition.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Grenade

      All your java are belong to us.

      'Nuff said.

    3. asdf
      Flame

      elementary Watson

      Open source databases being openly guided/funded/staffed by another Fortune 500 corporation sounded like a loose end needing to be fixed.

  17. Duncan Hothersall
    Unhappy

    The network is no longer the computer

    then.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    Remember?

    www.hal.com?

    When I worked there before sun, before assimilation,

    This had to be the coolest domain attached to my 3 letter email

    address. "im sorry Dave......"

  19. Kubla Cant

    Not just web pages

    I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure there's a lot of XML that references sun.com. Oracle can expect browser bookmarks and the like to be changed eventually, but the XML will probably live forever.

  20. Turgut Kalfaoglu

    very sad

    Very sad to see Sun go.. It has been a great company, too bad it got taken over by a DBMS company.

  21. Getter lvl70 Druid
    Terminator

    US Robotics

    Is the one for me - there is nothing that would be more exciting to me(1)(2) than to actually produce robots under that company name. About came unglued when 3com almost sold it to China. Sun is right up there.... spent more time looking through docs than I care to remember during my pizza box/Solaris x86 phase lol. It's hateful to see some of these old school brands fading away and crapola like Facebook/Twitter/Jobs rule the roost.

    (1) The passenger transport I was on experienced drive trouble after hitting some NASA space trash just outside this system. It exploded and I was shoved into an iescapepod (as much as Steve would like it, his patents are not enforceable off this planet so ha HA!). I was found by my step-parents and ever since then I await rescue.....

    (2). Yes I can be a total geek, however I have sex regularly so it hasn't been that big of a deal since I was a teenager. Helps if you marry a geek lol.

  22. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

    re: WTF is a Database company

    A lot of copies of Oracle were running on Sun hardware.

    When Sun goes away a lot of IBM, HP, etc salesmen are going to be visiting those server customers and they are also going to be plugging a switch to DB2, SqlServer, etc as part of the deal.

    Oracle didn't fancy that

  23. Chris Girocco

    Cease + Desist

    In '97 I was sent a cease and desist from Sun for using the suffix "sunsite" in a community domain name.

    I find a sick satisfaction that I personally outlived the corporate entity that threatened to destroy me.

    What was really funny is that the contact was made via snail mail :)

  24. Brian 39
    FAIL

    Oracle know how to profit (screw-up).

    OTN is a terrible place to find anything you need. Oracle = fail.

    We have given up and are migrating about 80% of our Sun infrastructure at work (about 60 servers) to RHEL on Dell and the rest will move to it once existing maintenance contracts are up.

    The RHEL/Dell combo s about 40% of the price and has the features we need, so goodbye and good riddance to ORACLE.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      which database?

      Type your comment here — plain text only, no HTML

  25. The Fuzzy Wotnot
    Pint

    Welcome to our nightmare lads and lasses!

    As an Oracle DBA, having had to suffer the mess that is Oracle support these days, I still find it amusing to listen to the Solaris admins in my shop bitch about the mess that Sun support is now, since Oracle took it over!

    Sad to see sun.com go, like almost all Unix geeks when you need to check a connection out to "da toobs" banging in "ping www.sun.com" was always at my fingertips!

  26. Rick Giles
    Linux

    Me thinks...

    That the acquisitions aren't over. I'll bet that some Seattle based software company might be interested in the database company that acquired/obliterated a decent OS/hardware company...

  27. Ilgaz

    So, why do they hate "Sun" brand?

    Does anyone have some kind of explanation for Oracle's hate of Sun brand? I mean it really is at pathological levels now.

    The breaking of documentation etc. too. People at Oracle, World's second largest sw company can't do some kind of "clever redirect" while BBC News site does it all the time.

  28. Avalanche

    Queue ...

    ... screams from Java developers and server administrators when there XML parsers attempt to locate DTD and schema definitions that for some reason don't have system-local resolution.

    In other words: I don't think that Oracle will close off the entire domain, just the usual user-visible parts.

  29. Matt_W

    Sun

    I always thought the Sun logo was great - very clever.

    No whalesong/boutique nonsense here!

    1. /dev/null
      Coat

      A clever logo...

      And only *slightly* reminiscent of a swastika too :-)

  30. Libertine
    Thumb Down

    gg oracle

    as if it wasnt painful enough to find relevant support documents allready.

    with the move from sunsolve to the oracle support site pretty much every google result that pointed to docs.sun.com became useless since you had to login and search for the damn thing a second time only with an utterly inferior search-engine...

  31. ZweiBlumen
    Boffin

    Oldest domain name?

    Anyone know what the earliest continously registered domain name is?

    dec.com: 1985

    sun.com: 1986

    ibm.com: 1986

    apple.com: 1987

    microsoft.com: 1991

    Interesting one there: Apple always ahead of microsoft....

    1. Libertine

      symbolics.com ?

      a little research came up with symbolics.com

      domain was continously registered for 25 years before being sold off but

      also there are a couple that predate dec.com:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_registered_Internet_domain_names

    2. Paul_Murphy

      Here you go..

      >Anyone know what the earliest continously registered domain name is?

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_currently_registered_Internet_domain_names

      Looks to be BBN - which is now owned by Raytheon though they haven't killed the BBN references.

      ttfn

  32. Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse
    Stop

    @ Why did Oracle by Sun...

    Well... even if you are the worlds third or so richest man, those funky carbon sails on those Americas cup boats don't pay for themselves y'know.

  33. Marc 1

    Sad.

    I cut my teeth on a Sparc IPC. Still have an Ultra 2 running under the desk. I used to comb all over those Sun pages back in the day. Anyone remember those FE handbooks for referencing part numbers?

  34. 88mm a.k.a. Minister for Misbehaviour
    Paris Hilton

    Sun Docs

    Yay! This was on the OpenSolaris twitter feed...

    OTN_Garage List of all #Sundocs migrated to OTN, with part numbers. Google "<part-num> site: oracle.com" to find your doc: http://bit.ly/eePgy5

    Makes you wonder about the human race, how we seem determined to take retrograde steps. Betamax vs. VHS, Microsoft vs. {INSERT COIN}, Bazooka Bubblegum vs. Hubba Bubba

    Seriously if ZFS isn't around in 10 years I'm going to be seriously pissed off.

    Paris - 'cause the SUN still shines out of her arse even when up on consecutive drug charges

  35. Jay Jaffa
    Linux

    Good ridddance

    Shower of bums - they set their team of legal beagles on me for my use of a domain with "sun" in the title - good riddance McNealey you f%£$£*g parasite

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